Thinking in the 3rd dimension

So I realized that my little sketch was mildly useful, but not super useful. Why not? Because it isn't to scale. I didn't know that all the things i wanted to fit on that wall would actually fit. Or that I would be able to work out a way to support my shelves so they don't just come tumbling down. So I figured a bit of a scale model would be helpful. Makes sense, right? So here you go. This is more or less what I'm thinking, but in 3D now.

You can see the upper shelves, the space for the trash and recycle cans and the bench. There's a 3'x8' pegboard on the wall behind the bench, too. The shelves start at about 6'6" up the wall, so they shouldn't interfere with normal movement underneath them. That's a heck of a lot of storage, too. Thirty three bins up top. I don't even know that I have thirty three bins, much less that many bins full of stuff that needs to be stored. Once we get the books out of bins and onto shelves, we're going to have a lot of extra bins just waiting for stuff. Long-term food storage could go up there, I suppose. Also camping equipment and the like.

What about the middle shelf? I don't know if I have room, unfortunately. We'll have to see how it works out. I'm thinking I may put one of our smaller basement shelves up there perpendicular to the wall and use that to store my larger bench tools. It would be an efficient use of the space, for sure. I really do need somewhere to store my larger power tools, and some of them are too tall to work out under the bench. Alternatively, I could put a larger shelf on the right hand wall, butted up to the bench. Not sure. I'll think about it and see what I can come up with. Some of this is going to have to be influenced by how much space the cars will take up. We won't know that until we pull them into the garage, really. I'd imagine I'll be parking on the right and will pull my car out when I need to work, but it would be nice to have at least enough space to be able to go grab a tool with the car pulled in.

So many things to think about on this one. Anyway, I'm sure we'll work it out. I'll keep you all posted, as always. Thanks for reading!

Taking it for Granite

Last night, my mom and I trucked on down to the granite place. It's not a showroom. It's not a room at all, actually. It was pretty much entirely outdoors. Big slabs of granite and marble just leaning against buildings and each other and in wooden racks. I guess weather really isn't going to hurt rocks so it makes sense, but it was still kinda wacky. Anyway, we struggled mightily to find a piece of granite that matched the granite tile we'd found when we picked our tile and just couldn't do it. There were a number of things that were close, but it became apparent we were trying to match the two granites instead of trying to match the granite with our actual tile. So we shifted gears and started looking for things that looked nothing like our granite tile but that would look awesome with our porcelain tile. We found a very dark piece that's a lot of black and brown. It's stunning and beautiful, and should work perfectly for us. I think, when combined with the dark wood cabinets and the light-colored tile, it will end up looking amazing.

So there you have it. Progress is being made, albeit slowly. Hopefully things will pick up soon, and I'll have exciting new pictures. Thanks for reading!

More non-visual progress

Well I don't have pictures, but more has been done to the house. For one, we picked out our cabinets for the master bath. They're going to be awesome. We also found a tile that we like, and we're going to look at granite for the counter and shower seat today. Those are all big wins in my book. I'll get some pictures of that stuff as soon as it's all locked down.

Also, my dad and I pulled all the shelves out of the garage. Bare walls in there now! It's crazy. Ready to be reworked and all. I'm got some big ideas for what I want to do in there. Here's a rough (very rough) idea of what my plan is.

This isn't to scale or anything, but it's sort of what I want to do. Shelves up top to fit our ubiquitous 12-gallon bins, space for the trash and recycle cans, another shelf unit, then a work bench and pegboard. I think this is a good use of the space in there, and gets me everything I want. So whee.

Garage Progress

Not much to report from this weekend except a bit of progress on the garage. My dad and I pulled all the bins and boxes and junk off the shelves that the previous owner had built, and put them in a pile in the garage or in the basement. We're getting ready to pull all the shelves down and completely revamp the garage. This is where we are now:

And also this:

So I'm going to keep demolishing these shelves and keeping the pieces, since i think we'll be able to use at least some of it again in our design. I haven't entirely figured out how I want to build the shelves, but my dad and I will get to work on it later this week. Thanks for reading!

Master Bathroom Virtual Vanity

We met with our cabinet designer last night, and she had mocked up our master bathroom vanity for us. Here it is, in all its low-res glory (I could've scanned in higher quality images, but then I would've had to push a bunch of buttons and all that jazz).

Here you can see the two sinks, the cabinets, and the shelf stack on top of the counter. We're hoping this will get us a good amount of storage in the relatively limited space we have. The faucets, cabinet hardware, countertop, etc are all just generic. Ours will actually look a lot different. We'll also be putting oval mirrors up with one light fixture over each one, and medicine cabinets on each side.

This is the 3/4 view so you can see the depth of the shelf stack and all. it takes up some counter space, but I think the increase in overall storage is well worth the sacrifice. We'll still have far more counter space than we do right now, so it doesn't feel like it will be all that bad. The builder is also planning to put it in such that if we later decide that we hate it, we can remove it and won't have any giant holes in the counter or anything.

Lookin' pretty good, I think! We're both very excited for all of this. I'll let you know what happens next. Thanks for reading!

No pictures? What sort of slacker blog is this?

I'll get back to pictures, don't you worry your pretty head about it. I just have some things to say that don't involve pictures, and that means you'll have to enter the magical world of your imagination.

We had a cold weekend here in Colorado. Cold enough that we felt compelled to blow out the sprinkler system, lest it freeze. My dad and I have both sort of done it before, but not really, so we just kinda fiddled around with it until we eventually figured it out. I'm pretty sure we got it handled, though. Everything was just air coming out when we were done, so that's what matters. We may even have muddled our way into a repeatable process, which would be nice. Here's what we did (for my own reference next year):

1. Turn off the water supply at the street using the curb stop key.
2. Turn on the compressor and let the tank fill up at 120 psi.
3. Turn the valve from the supply line into the manifold all the way off. Turn the valve from the manifold into the sprinkler box all the way off. Open the top right valve on the manifold to let the water drain.
4. Attach the air nozzle to the top right port on the manifold. You have to use teflon tape or it will leak too much to achieve proper pressure.
5. Once the compressor tank is full, you can attach the hose to the nozzle. Use a screwdriver to turn the valve to the open position to pressurize the manifold.
6. If the pressure is high enough, the air should close the top safety valve thingy, and the manifold will pressurize and stay that way. You may have slight leaks, but as long as the pressure is enough that air isn't coming out the top valve, you're okay.
7. Slowly open the valve from the manifold to the sprinkler box. Now there is air pressure behind any water in the pipes leading down to the sprinkler box.
8. Go to the sprinkler control panel and manually start the sprinkler cycle. Allow each zone to run until only air is coming out of all nozzles.
9. Detach the air hose from the nozzle and remove the nozzle from the valve.
10. Turn all valves to 45º so they are half open. This will give any remaining water room to expand so it doesn't burst pipes. The only water left in the system should be between the manifold and the supply at the street. Unfortunately, there isn't any good way to get rid of that water, so it's just going to hang out.
11. Remove the top cap from the manifold and take out the plastic valve. Put a piece of duct tape over the hole that remains, to keep bugs or anything else from getting into the system. This will make sure you don't have to be one of the hundreds of people in your neighborhood who find out in the spring that their plastic valve broke, and that they need to go to the hardware store to get a new one. Put the valve pieces in a zip-lock bag and use a thumbtack to hold them to the wall next to your sprinkler panel in the garage. You don't lose them, they stay together and safe, and you remember that you need to put them back in before you turn on your system in the spring. Big win all around.
12. Last thing to do is to turn off the sprinkler system at the panel. If you don't, your valves will still open and close and nothing will happen because there's no pressure in the system. You wouldn't want that, would you?

I'm pretty sure that's it. Just empty your compressor tank, put away your tools, and you're good to go. No burst pipes for you! Make sure to unhook your hoses from the spigots and all as well.

So that was Friday night. Yesterday, we had another contractor come in to give us an estimate on the master bath. Or rather, he looked around and took notes and will get back to us in a week to give us an estimate. He's the second one we've had in there, but we don't have solid numbers from the first guy yet, either. We're hoping it's something reasonable so we can just pay someone to have the project all done for us. We want a beautiful bathroom, but we have to keep in mind that it's a tract home and a $50K master bathroom isn't a good investment. I do love the feeling of a solid gold toilet seat, though.

I'll keep you posted as we make more progress. Thanks for reading!

More pictures of vegetables and stuff

Two posts in one day? I know, crazy. I've been sitting on pictures for a while and pictures mean posts in this blog.

My parents have offered to help us get ourselves back on track with fixing up the house and one of the projects was weeding the back yard. It had gotten bad. very bad. Unconscionably bad. I had so many weeds I couldn't look my neighbors in the eye. The only person who was okay with the situation is my dog (yes, my dog is a person in my head) because she likes hiding in the long grass when she hunts wild water bottles.

Unfortunately I neglected to take any before shots, so you're just getting afters. The weeds in this area covered the entire section from the side of the house to the fence. Some were taller than the fence. It was bad. Now it's much better.

We had weeds in the back corner that were also taller than the fence, as well as other weeds all through the grass and the rocks.

Look at our little melon! It's still growing and now it has a buddy (not pictured).

This is one of our tiny onions. it turned into sandwich toppings and it was good. Freakin' potent, though. Tiny onions pack a punch.

The carrots are coming along very nicely. We've used them in salads, soups, stews, etc. it's so crazy that I can go out to my yard and just grab food out of the ground. Even now, that amazes me.

That's more or less it for now. We've been talking to electricians and general contractors, trying to get our master bathroom past the current stall point, so I'll keep you posted on that as more news becomes available.

Thanks for reading!

Big progress, delayed reporting

We have nasty water at our house. It's overchlorinated by about a billion. It tastes like Michael Phelps' nether regions (Don't ask how I know. Let's just say tuition isn't cheap and leave it at that.), and leaves nasty rust stains or something on everything. Super gross. So we wanted to install a whole house filter. This one, specifically:

It's already in my house, so it was the natural choice. My friends Isaac and Jordan came over to help, with Isaac doing the majority of the real plumbing work.

Here's Isaac turning off the water to prepare for the project.

We learned that the screwdriver in my "Free Multitool with Purchase" multitool is barely deserving of the name.

I hear that the first cut is the deepest.

We're installing a bypass into the system using ball valves and copper pipe instead of going with the plastic bypass that came in the box. Metal is better for this sort of thing, for sure.

Turning the corner. These are the input/output valves to close off the filter if we ever need to do maintenance on it.

We put the metal behind the pipes so we didn't burn the plastic covering the insulation any more than necessary. The gloves are spacers so the metal didn't touch the pipe and leach away the heat Isaac was trying to put on them.

Whee, soldering! This is my bane. I've never tried it on pipes, but any time I have to solder wires or anything together, a little part of me dies. I just can't make it work for some reason.

Everything's all soldered up now. Just have to connect it on down to the filter itself.

Those long pipes with the threads on the end are taking our water down into the vicinity of the filter. We were lucky in that we didn't need to mess with crossing our lines or anything. The input and output were already in the right configuration for the filter.

There she is, in pride of place. Or in the place of pride. In any event, she's in place and I'm proud.


I didn't get pictures, but I wrapped the threads and attached it up. We got it working and the water has improved significantly. It's still not as tasty as the bottled stuff, but it's actually drinkable now. I've taken to drinking from the faucet while Jenna still prefers the bottles. It's okay, though. She's small.

Also, this filter seems pretty awesome. Automatically back-flushes the filter on whatever schedule you set, so you never need to replace it. It's the Whirlpool Gold Whole House Filter, if you're interested. Thanks for reading!