Before, During, and After

I don't usually blog much about home improvement, but I figured I ought to do a follow-up post to the one about venturing into the crawlspace above my kitchen. It was a success. I won't bore my readers with details of the other various kitchen renovations we have been doing (painting all of the cabinets, stripping wallpaper from and painting the walls, removing an old non-functional built-in double oven and replacing it with new shelving, replacing the faucet, etcetera etcetera...) but I figured I'd do a brief pictorial chronicle of the soffit upgrade.

Before:

During:

After:

Boo-yah. It would be even more effective if I had included the atrocious wallpaper that was on there before (the wall had already been painted below the soffit in the "before" picture, which I know is totally the wrong order to do things, but we kept waffling on whether or not to take out the soffit before Thanksgiving). Anyway, I figure there has probably been many a past homeowner of this house that cursed that awful defunct soffit, and finally it is gone thanks to me. Feels good.

Read More

I really need a male friend and a beer right now

The American male culture of not showing fear or other perceived signs of weakness may be emotionally stunting, but damn, now and then it can have it's advantages. I'm scared out of my wits right now, but if I had a male friend and a beer in my hand, I'd be cracking jokes and ready to dive right into the job.

Some backstory... we are renovating our kitchen, and there is this thing coming down from the ceiling (we are calling it a soffit, which I guess it technically is, although usually when you say "soffit" in relation to kitchens, you are talking about the part of the ceiling that comes down above the cupboards) that has nothing in it but a single recessed light (which might as well be on the ceiling proper) and a bunch of insulation. No ducting, nothing. We haven't quite figured out why anybody would have put it in to begin with. It looks safe to remove, so... we're gonna do it.

This fucker is coming out.

You can see the soffit in the picture to the right. Sorry for the bad lighting; the electricity is off in the kitchen (for obvious reasons). You can see the soon-to-be-former recessed light hanging out, and then a pole that I stuck up in there. I'll tell you why the pole in a second.

As I mentioned, the thing is stuffed with insulation. I had originally been anticipating a god-awful mess, a veritable rain of insulataion, at the point when I planned to saw the drywall out -- but then my sister suggested there is probably a crawlspace above the kitchen, and maybe I could shovel the insulation out first. So there is, and as intimidating as crawlspaces can be, on reflection I think that is the right solution.

So here I stand, with the crawlspace open and a halogen light shining into it, completely shitting my pants about going in there. It was bad enough opening the door -- I expected a gollum to jump out and bite my face off, or at the very least for a big pile of dead bodies to come rolling out and knock me off the ladder. The fact that I don't believe in monsters is cold comfort when you are by yourself, on a ladder, opening a creepy looking door that you anticipate crawling through in the near future.

It's a mess up there. To get my bearings, I stuck a pole up through the hole where the recessed light is, so I can see how far back I will need to go.

There's this weird perceptual effect... if I walk from the garage (where the crawlspace entrance is) to the kitchen, I would estimate the soffit is maybe 10-15 ft away from the entrance.

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it..." (The pole is circled in red)

But when I peer through the crawlspace, my estimate is more like 25-30ft!

If only I was holding a cold beer and had a guy friend here. That old male conditioning would kick in, and I'd just take a big swig and say (imagine frat boy voice here) "Let's DO it! Hell yeah!" But alone, beerless, and with no incentive to conform to a specific gender role... damn, this sucks.

Read More

Five years of school and ten years of industry experience: Just jiggle the connector

A couple of weeks ago, my oven stopped working. It's one of those gas range/electric oven dealies, with a smaller second oven where the broiler drawer usually is (the main oven is used for broiling). The control panel stopped working, but the gas burners would still light (not just spew gas, they would light without a match, which takes electricity) and the lower oven -- which is controlled by a dial rather than the digital control panel -- worked fine.

A little bit of googling told me it was most likely what I already suspected: The electronics in the control panel were shot. It is supposedly not too difficult of a DIY job to replace it, but based on comparable parts I found online, it looked like the part itself would cost about $150.

I opened up the stove and googled for what I thought was the part number, but to no avail. So we called GE. They wanted to send somebody out, but of course it's $80 just to even have them look at it. We got an 800 number from GE where we could most likely order the part, but it was already past 5:00 so we had to wait until the next day. In abject discouragement, I put the panel back together, screwed it back in, plugged in the stove, and turned the breaker back on.

But wait, rewind -- I am a computer engineer by education, and while I am more of a software engineer by trade, I still do a lot of low-level work, sometimes on custom hardware. When I had the thing open, you better believe there's one thing I was certainly going to do: Check for loose or bent wires, look for obvious defects on the circuit board, and, most importantly, jiggle all of the connectors. I can't tell you how many $10,000 systems I have seen rendered unusable because of nothing but a loose cable.

Lo and behold, when I turned everything back on, it works fine. Hallelujah!

Read More

Wherein I prove my ineptitude with a jigsaw...

My first attempt at making toys for Quinn:

Believe it or not, the camera is actually rather kind here. Up close, it looks like they were made by a drunken pirate with epilepsy. Oh well, it was just a prototype -- I need to make the finished product out of a harder wood than pine anyway. I'll do better next time... right?

Edit: If you click on it to see the larger version, you can see the drunken piratism I referred to earlier.

Read More

The atheism, cooking, and home improvement blog?

I should really start taking before and after pictures of the work we do on our house...

So Saturday night we went to put up casing around a doorway that, for some reason, didn't have any. This doorway also is a special case, because when I was installing our new floor I sorta screwed up and left a gap along the sides of the doorway, thinking it would be covered by baseboard.. but duh, you don't put baseboard in doorways, idiot...


I was initially going to just put the casing up on the one side where it was missing, and put quarter-round over the gap, which would look a little silly but at least would be unobtrusive (before this past weekend I actually did have baseboard in there, and it looked really dumb).

But the casing on the other side is screwy as hell. I hadn't noticed this at first. See, normally, when you put casing around a doorway, you leave about 1/4" of the original frame. There's a name for this I can't remember. Anyway, check the casing around your doorways, you'll see it. It looks weird if you try to butt the casing right up against the edge, and also I think you run the risk of the casing starting to jut out as the house settles.

On the side of the doorway that already had casing, they put up this weird molding on the corner of the frame, I don't know what to call it... maybe it doesn't even count as molding. Anyway, if you cut a cross-section, the profile would be L-shaped. It like, sharpens the definition of the corner or something. We have it a couple other places in our house where there is an outer corner of a wall. I don't particularly care for it, but I'm afraid to find out what is underneath it.

So on the doorway in question, where they should have that 1/4" of exposed door frame, instead they have one of these weird L-shaped moldings, and then the casing is jutted up against that. This has the effect of there being a small piece of molding that protrudes into the doorway on that side.. and if I do it correctly on the other side, that means that it will be the other way around, so you have this sort of dumb-looking staircasing effect almost. It's hard to explain without a picture.... maybe I'll draw one later.

I'm not having that. And combined with the mess with the flooring, I decided to bite the bullet and go with Crazy Plan B.

Crazy Plan B involves replacing the casing on both sides, which is a good thing anyway because almost all of the doorways in this house have the cheapest casing money can buy. However, when I pull off that L-molding, I know there's gonna be some crazy shit under it (and there was). But I'd already had this sorta crackpot idea for fixing my boner with the flooring gap, and it would also solve that problem: Cut planks to be 3/8" thick and to the size of the doorway, and nail them up -- thus shrinking the doorway by 3/4", but giving me a sort of new faux-frame to build on, while simultaneously covering the gap in the flooring.

Long story short, it worked, it looks great, but it was a pain in the ass. I couldn't find 3/8" plank that was long enough (the thinnest I could find that was long enough was listed as 1" == 3/4" in reality) so I had to do a rip cut all the way down an 8-foot board. On top of that, the blade on my table saw wasn't tall enough, so I had to cut halfway through, flip the board over, and finish the cut. I'm sure it was dangerous as all get out, and I managed to blow a fuse once from the saw working so hard. But, as you can probably guess from the fact you are reading this, I am still in one piece.

Also I hope nobody decides they want to put a door in that doorway because they are going to be really pissed off when they discover that it is 35 1/4" wide now. I don't think that's a standard door size.... heh.

Maybe pictures and/or diagrams later. I should start documenting my home improvement adventures on this blog anyway. It would have been great to have a record of my slow fumbling progress in learning how to do crown molding, for example... I'm finally good at it now, but man, that's a hard thing to do!

Read More