Category: Houseblog

I opened my eyes yesterday to brilliant light streaming in the window. Lisa said to me, “We need to get up. It’s 11:30.” Startled I rolled out of bed and into the shower quickly, then came down to cook breakfast. A minute later Lisa said, “I need to fix my watch; it’s still on East Coast time.” Nothing like getting three hours back at the start of your day to really make you want to be productive.

So we were. After breakfast we got out into the yard. Lisa swept the patio and started weeding the back beds (where we are starting to see our first flowers). I took a hacksaw to the ten foot long pine branch that we lost in a windstorm in January. Then I mowed the grass and helped Lisa dig up some of the garden beds and cover them to kill any remaining weeds.

Afterwards we went downtown and walked by the water. It was amazing after so many dark months how choked with people the sidewalks were. It was just as though someone had flipped a switch and turned the town back on.

Today of course it’s raining and chilly. Gotta love the Northwest.

I had all kinds of things I was going to try to do today. A few of them are off my list, since I slept until noon. Ah well. —Waking up listening to Murmur, which (Greg points out) the band finished recording at Reflection Studios in Charlotte, NC twenty years ago this month.

I heard a tapping this morning as I was getting dressed, coming from the north wall of the bedroom. I’ve heard this before this week, so I decided it was time to see what was up. I tiptoed around the back corner of the house, and there was a bird, not moving, watching me, parked under one of the soffit vents under the eaves of the house.

I’m not sure whether it’s broken through the screen and has built a nest or whether it’s just looking for food, but I know I can’t do a lot about it without getting a taller ladder. The soffit vent is almost two stories up, and there’s no attic from inside to access that part of the roofline.

I took a few pictures of our newest house guest this morning, but I forgot that Lisa has the USB cable I use to get pictures from the camera to the computer. It was a brown bird with a spot of bright red color near its beak—I couldn’t see the pattern exactly and it flew away before I could take the picture.

So the conclusion of the “Tim with power tools” saga: I need a lot more practice. I made a few discoveries while working on the project to build a frame in which to mount the drawers and hang them from the bench:

• It’s difficult to make straight cuts with a hand held jigsaw when it’s cutting from the direction of the floor up. I had no clamps, so I used my table vise (thanks to my father-in-law for buying this for me this summer) to grip the boards I was cutting. Only I couldn’t clamp them so that they lay flat, as the jaws weren’t quite wide enough. I had to clamp them standing on edge. The long boards were OK, but the six-inch cleats came out looking pretty deformed.
• Assembly is always trickier than it looks. In this case, holding up the frame, even without the drawers, so that it made contact with the underside of the bench, while simultaneously hitting the pre-drilled holes with the lag bolts coming up from the frame, then holding the frame against the bench one corner at a time to wrench in the lags was almost impossible.

Somehow I got it done, and then collapsed. I had let the foiled pot roast overcook—only possible if there’s a hole in the foil, incidentally—and it was edible but on the dry side. Ouch.

Anyway. Today will be an interesting day at work, as I get to meet someone who’s on my blogroll that I’ve been dying to meet for a while. Details later.

As some frequent readers may have guessed from the timestamp on my rambling Columbia eulogy earlier, I had just returned from taking Lisa to the airport. She has one last session of dental surgery with her Boston dentist, and had a 6:45 flight this morning. So I’ve been up since about 4:30. When I got home this morning I collapsed on the couch and started writing—I had to, to get my thoughts out, and the grammar shows it.

After writing, I read the paper and then decided to get busy. Making waffles has to be the most rewarding form of manual labor I know: a relatively small number of ingredients, no assembly or processing save stirring, and a quick hover over the waffle iron later, they’re all done. In the meantime between waffles I cleaned up the kitchen. Then I got a foil pot roast in the oven (it should be ready about 3) and headed to the garage.

The first order of business with Lisa out of town is to finish the loud projects in the garage that I’ve been postponing, namely starting with the drawers under the workbench. I had to rethink my initial plan a little bit: I don’t have any lumber that is both thick enough to support the weight of the drawers and tall enough to allow the drawer slides to be mounted near the bottom and still attach to the crossbraces at the top. So I cut six cleats, six inches tall, from a 1×4 board, mounted one each to the front and back of the drawer slides, and mounted both drawers’ slides on either sides of two cleats in the center. The next step is to bolt the cleats to supporting cross-boards at the top and bottom, then mount the top cross-boards to the workbench studs. By then the pot roast should be ready, and I can move onto the next step: gumbo.

What? Hey, I’m cooking for a week here. And besides, no matter how much of an escape it may be, there’s no therapy like building things with your hands.

All my relatives should be fearing for my safety right about now. I got a jigsaw on Saturday.

My eye-hand coordination is somewhere south of dismal. You know how the kids who can’t play sports can at least play video games? I’m the one who always killed QBert in the early 80s because I couldn’t figure out which way the joystick went. So the concept of me + power tools = scary.

This is a first step to our first big post-housewarming project. We have a closet that was sheetrocked after the floor was laid in our sun porch, but the closet sits empty while our kitchen is stuffed. We’ll be putting in some shelving and storing a lot of barware in the new pantry/bar/whatever we’re going to call it.

But first I have to learn to operate the saw safely. My plan is to use it to cut the lumber that will frame the drawers I’m going to hang under my workbench. We have two kitchen drawers that were displaced when our dishwasher was installed, and no other place to put them, so I thought, why not? The answer is apparently “because there’s not much there to attach them to.” So the plan is to cut some two-by-fours to the length of the drawers and mount the slides on them, then put cross-boards across the tops of the drawers perpendicular to the drawer mounts and screwed into the drawer slide pieces. Then I’ll use the cross members to mount the assembly to the bracing members under the workbench.

Theoretically. The good news is that the plan doesn’t call for a lot of complicated cuts, so it should be just the thing to learn how to operate the saw. The only trick is finding the time.

I’ve been continuing to play around with the Sony RM-AV3000 universal remote and may have actually found success. With a little help from RemoteCentral, I got around the gripe that I had about stateful buttons. Specifically, I found a setup that, from any input state, allows me to reliably choose the input on my Philips TV on which the DVD player and amplifier are providing input. It has nothing to do with the Input button, which is stateful. Instead, I can use the channel buttons. Use the keypad in the TV section to go to channel 002, then channel down three times for the cable or VCR (composite inputs) and four times for the component inputs. So now my DVD macro looks like: TV 002 Ch- Ch- Ch- Ch- AMP (DVD input) DVD Play. It looks a bit naff but it works great.

Maybe now Lisa will use the remote…

As Anita requested, here’s a quick update on my Christmas toy, the Sony RM-AV3000 universal remote.

First, the good: programming it is pretty straightforward. There are two kinds of programming you can do with a remote like this, learning and macros. Learning involves teaching the remote to duplicate a signal produced by another remote. You put the universal remote in learning mode, tell it which button you want to take the new function, and then hold down the button on the other remote until the universal beeps. Simple. Macros are sequences of commands that the remote has already learned (or that it had assigned at the factory). They’re also pretty simple: tell the universal which button you want to assign the macro to, then go through and press all the buttons on the universal in the sequence you want them to happen.

I’ve programmed a few macros so far. I have two macros for power on (turns on all the devices in the system) and power off. That way, I don’t have to worry in other macros about whether devices are on or off. Other macros generally involve automating the sequence of switching the amplifier to the correct source channel and hitting “Play” on the target device (e.g. the CD player). The most complicated adjustment is the DVD player, because it uses a different input on the TV than everything else.

The bad: My wife still won’t give up the other remotes. In spite of the fact that it takes her two remotes (cable and amplifier) to watch TV, she prefers this to the new remote. This is primarily because she doesn’t “want to take the time to learn the new remote.” It’s also because of …

The ugly: Your final command setup is only as clean as your existing remotes will allow. There are generally two types of buttons on remotes: stateless, which always tell the device to do the same thing (or keep doing what it was doing before—think pressing a Play button twice), and stateful, which tell the device to do different things depending on the result of the last time the button was pressed (think about the Power button: one push turns it on, another turns it off). Stateful buttons are useful for maximizing real estate on a remote control, but they’re hell for programming. Without a discrete “power on” command, workarounds like my “power on/power off” macros are needed. Worse, without a discrete set of commands to select between the S-Video, component, and composite inputs on my TV, there’s really no way to fully automate switching from TV to DVD and back again. I have no way of knowing beforehand what input state the TV was in, and hence don’t know how many times I need to send the “Switch Input” signal.

As Anita said in her inital comment, “no wonder that only a small percentage of people do a lot of home theater and audio stuff. It’s just complicated!” I now understand why people pay a lot of money for systems with insanely complicated remotes. They’ll never use the original remote, but they need it to program the universal remote…

No, not pain from the beer, pain from getting the spare bedroom ready for my parents. The bedroom had a full size mattress and box spring, and a bed frame, in it. And a big sheet of drywall. Too big to fit in the garage (which is already full of crap). Too big to fit up into the attic. Lisa cut the drywall in half. I dragged it up the attic stairs. I had to get the room empty for a queen size air mattress (double height; we’re not barbarians).

But where was the full size bed to go?

Well, after several months of kvetching over where to put the clawfoot tub that we had ripped out back in July and had sitting in the front of the garage (in my car’s stall, thankyouverymuch), we finally made room under my workbench. And, contrary to expectation, the tub was eminently shovable. So we moved some more stuff around, put the mattress, box springs, and frame in the garage. Then drove my car in.

Words fail me. I know this afternoon I was waxing transcendent about Pärt, but this is a whole different kind of transcendence. There will be no pine needles on my car in the morning. And with that thought, this pained houseblogger is going to bed. I have inlaws coming tomorrow and I’ll need my rest. 🙂

One of the drawbacks of being a music fiend is storage. Periodically, I have to cull my CDs to get rid of the chaff so that they can all fit in the Ikea cabinet where they now reside. The discarded CDs go into temporary storage in a box, until I have enough to take them to a used CD store that might buy them.

With our move, I had a ton of CDs, probably about 75, and no idea where to take them. I finally found Love Music in Redmond, which bought about a third of the CDs on Tuesday for a decent sum. (The rest will go to family members who want them or to the library.)

With the money from the sale of the CDs in hand, plus some birthday swag and a rebate gift card, I went to Best Buy to pick up what Lisa happily calls my “new toy,” the Sony RM-AV3000 universal remote. The purchasing experience was a little unnerving. After the clerk went to the back to pick one out, he apologetically said, “They told me I have to walk this to the front with you.” Apparently the little beggars have been flying off the shelves in more ways than one.

I got it home, and within fifteen minutes had all our components programmed into the device. I’ve since figured out how to do “punchthrough” for the volume keys (since all our gear is run through the amplifier, I don’t want the DVD, VCR, or TV remote signal sending volume commands to the TV, which is actually silent). Next step: programming macros.

The impetus for this remote, and the need for macros, was the set of steps required to switch from watching cable to watching a DVD:

1. Turn on the DVD player (DVD remote).
2. Change the TV to the component video inputs (TV remote).
3. Change the amplifier to use DVD inputs and outputs (amplifier remote).
4. Navigate the menu and play the DVD (DVD remote).
5. Do any in-movie volume adjustments (amplifier remote).

Five tasks, three remotes. Needless to say, it’s comparably painful switching back to cable, programming the VCR, or playing CDs or LPs. The macro capability of the RM-AV3000 promises to help me automate some of these tasks (reduce number of button clicks) as well as reduce the number of remote controls involved. Just the thing to keep me occupied over the winter holiday!

My “excitement” over the rain beginning again on Wednesday was premature. Today we’re back to sunshine. And fog. I usually come in at the southeastern side of campus, which runs alongside low ground next to Marymoor Park, and this morning the fog was still heavy along the whole drive despite the morning sunshine.

Our friend Bethany was in town on business this week (she“s on Senator Murray’s staff). We met her for drinks last night. Which is to say, Lisa met her for drinks and I followed about half an hour later, having got stuck in traffic on the 520 bridge. In the meantime, they had moved on to Nordstrom’s for some boot shopping. As I said before, they both have impeccable taste, so it was quite a sight to watch the two of them run through Nordstrom’s inventory. Afterwards I ran back to work for a rehearsal of “Accidents Will Happen” (more on that shortly).

Why is this a houseblog entry? Because this morning I stumbled out of bed and downstairs to hang our newly arrived blinds in our front bedroom. Nothing like hanging blinds first thing in the morning to really get the day going. The only difficulties I ran into were a broken drill bit (the tip of one of my two 1/16th-inch bits broke off in the wood, fortunately leaving me enough to work with to finish the job) and a small problem with the measurements. I had measured inside one section of the frame, but then our window contractor came back and used that to put in the screens (since the windows swing out, the screens have to be installed inside the windows). So I had to go one molding section out, and as a result the blinds don’t fit as snugly as they might. But they’re installed and they work great.

Tonight is our housewarming finally, after all the procedures and address change (have it done at https://www.us-mailing-change-of-address.com). I hope to have some good pictures to share.

We painted trim last night and today (three window frames, two door frames, baseboards, five windows) in the front bedroom, and put a second coat of paint (“Washed Lemon”) on the walls. We also lost a little of the paint on the moldings to the masking tape. (Aside: when did masking tape become blue? And when did it start having an appetite for high gloss paint?)

In between, we painted the ceiling and the walls above the trim bar in the parlor (now called the Sun Room, owing to the color) a brighter white. And hung the shades. Gotta love Smith and Noble: mail order custom shades, thankyouverymuch. We’ll have pictures shortly, once we finish hanging the Italian china.

And once I finish touching up the damaged trim where some of the paint got taken off by the tape, we’re pretty much done with painting. At least until next year….

A few of you haven’t seen the short little teaser photo album we put together with a few “work in progress” pictures of our home improvement work. So far it shows our parlor after the wallpaper was removed and after the first go of paint.

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Craig pointed to the Trading Spaces Drinking Game. I love the listing of items–I hope the show’s creators are looking at this too. Some of the joy of watching the show is getting to know the personalities, but I know that if I hear Vern talk about “leaving a penny on the table” one more time I’m gonna scream.

I do love that they pointed out the bit about tarps not being used while painting a room. How do they get away with that??? I always end up leaving our tarps looking like a Jackson Pollock painting.
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Warning: life trivia ahead. They kept saying it would happen, but the longer the drought went the less I was prepared for it to start. But it’s nice not having to worry about all the plants we put in dying.

Why are halogen flood light bulbs $12? It just seems a little exhorbitant for something that’s going to blow out and die.