"Turn on Christmas"

We have jumped on the "smart" home bandwagon. Is it a bandwagon? I don't know. But we have some smart plugs and some connected speakers (which we will discuss in a future post), thanks to the power of buying stuff.

Why are we risking opening our home to hackers (as they say the "S" in IoT is for security)? Well, because 1. turning on the Christmas tree lights is REALLY REALLY hard and 2. we wanted to have synced music across the house.

Do you see the plug? It's there....

We are an Apple household, so that means we already own an Apple TV. It also can serve as a home automation hub - functionally that means that it serves as a intermediary that puts all of the smart widgets in one application.

What are the smart widgets? We have two Wemo Mini Smart plugs, one powering the Christmas tree and the other powering the dining room sideboard lights. It was a HUGE pain getting these smart plugs recognized by Apple's "Home" app. Apparently contemporary versions of these plugs have a "HomeKit" barcode which you can scan and connect with immediately. I guess our local Target sells these so infrequently that we ended up with a really old version that pre-dates HomeKit compatibility.

I had to install a "Wemo" app, connect to the smart plugs, install a firmware update, wait 12+ hours for someone or something to generate a HomeKit code, then (while my iPhone was on the exact same network as the smart plug) type the HomeKit code into the Apple "Home" app. I wasted a HUGE amount of time initially because I connected the smart plugs to our "guest" network, which is more secure since it doesn't have access to any devices on our home network. But that was a little too secure as the smart plugs couldn't see the Apple TV it needed to sync with. Oops.

Anyways, once I got that all sorted out we could see our two plugs on our Apple "Home" app. I set up a "scene" that automatically turns on "Christmas" (both smart plugs go from "off" to "on") whenever either of us returns home after sunset.

As the smart plugs also supported the Alexa Smart Home system, I also digitally hooked the plugs into our Alexa (fortunately being on one smart home system does not preclude being on another). So we can also activate/deactivate both plugs simultaneously by saying "Alexa, turn on Christmas" and "Alexa, turn off Christmas."

Practically this means that we have the tree and sideboard on MUCH more now, which makes for a much more festive home. (When you have to lean over a wobbly lamp and reach though a scratchy tree covered in precariously placed glass ornaments to turn something on - you don't do it much.)

Winter-Ready Playground

At two-year's old, the kids' playground was starting to show its age. It's holding up very well and remains a sturdy, amusing addition to our backyard. But the roof and a few other surfaces had lost their finish in a way that made us worry that it was bad for the wood.

After a little research, we opted to use a spray can of Olympic Waterguard seal, rather than the paint-on polyurethane or deck stain. We weren't trying to do anything too dramatic, just protect it from the weather and give it back a little of its cedar color.

D grabbed the ladder and started lightly sanding the damaged surfaces on a rare weekend day this fall that looked like it would stay dry for a few hours.

It took really minimal prep work, compared to a more dramatic refinish. The results were pretty much immediate. This is beam on the other side of the set. The left picture is the "before," and the right is "after." The color was a bit redder than we expected, but it does seem to be blending in ok to our...let's call it "aged cedar."

Here is the roof, after the treatment. You can see it's a little redder than the untreated places, like the vertical wall below it, but it no longer has that scaley, weathered look that made me think it would become susceptible to rot. Besides the annoyance of having to wait for a dry, not-too-windy day and of having to bring out the ladder, this project took minimal work. For once, a job that took exactly as much effort as we though (maybe even less!). And we have enough sealer in the can that we can probably do it next year with no new supplies needed. Our playground is winter-ready!

Giant Dust Rabbits

A whopping 10 years ago, I wrote about various strategies to hunt dust bunnies. The kind of bunnies I hadn't accounted for were the hidden, lurking kinds. A few months ago when we flipped our mattress, we discovered an entire warren of dust bunnies. They were so big, I'd like to think of them as dust Flemish Giant rabbits. These must have have been growing under our bed for...years? Our bunny warren was lurking underneath the drawers in our bed frame, which meant we had to open the drawers and pull up the bed slats to see them. I guess that's why we hadn't noticed even when we flipped the mattress other times--it was just luck that one bunny was visible enough to prompt us to explore further. The sight was so gross that I forgot to take a picture before grabbing the vacuum, so the pictures below show much less dust than we originally found.

Thankfully, with a little awkward hopping over the drawers and between the frames, we were able to vacuum up most of the bunnies and wipe down the floors with a damp cloths.

Knowing this has been under our bed for who-knows-how-long is gross, but at least now we know to attack this space every time we remember to flip the mattress. I wonder what other hidden dust warrens are lurking in our house. Most of our furniture is up on legs to help our baseboard heaters be more effective, so usually we can see (and clean) under them. So I hope that while we definitely collect some dust along our baseboards, we don't have quite the giant dust bunnies found here in too many unknown warrens around the house. Because EWWWWW!

It's been a bit quiet around here lately but stay tuned for a few posts we have lined up. We might not be blogging but we're busy around the house, as always.