A Pause

The pause in my posts is directly related to the fact that there simply has not been much to share. In late March, we had a slew of specialist contractors come to put in all the infrastructure that we need in the space. Plumbers came through and ran the pipes for our toilet...

...And sinks. Here's the shower room:

And the toilet room (which actually will need to be rerouted, since we failed to tell our contractor that we planned to have medicine cabinets, so the recessed box will have to go where the pipe currently is):

The HVAC team brought in our Mitsubishi Hyper-Heating mini-split (I don't know about you, but that brand makes me think of cars and not HVAC units--but apparently they make quite good systems!) and loaded it into the encapsulated crawl space. Then the next two days consisted of running the ductwork after consulting us about where we'd like everything to go. Since the HVAC unit is under the floors, most of our vents are low to the ground (except the return, which is up high since hot air rises and it usually sucks out hot air, though this is a year round system that also provides heat). In the bedroom, our vents are on the floor. In the bathroom(s), they are on the walls just above the floor. In our closet area, one will be coming out of the bottom of our built-in closets. One vent (into the toilet room):

Floor vents in the bedroom:

Return, in the hallway:

After a long walk-through to confirm where we wanted switches and plugs based on both the blueprint and last minute preferences (like how high we want the ones in the bathroom shelving units, etc.), the electrician ran the wiring to all the things. Here's the wall our bed will be on:

One aspect I hadn't realized as we committed to a heated towel rack, steam shower, AND radiant flooring is how many control units we will need on the wall. Here's the wall of the toilet room, looking through the hallway to a similar set up on the wall of the shower room.

The electrician also started getting things set up for our recessed lighting and a box for mounting a ceiling fan:

And got the wiring set up for our outdoor lighting:

They also installed a subpanel in the basement (picture later when it looks more like a real working electrical box and less like an empty box with some random dangling wires). 

The framers also came back to put the hardware in for our panel doors (the metal bits):

That, all together, took us to the end of March. I'm including a lot of detail now but honestly was planning to just gloss over all that stuff. So why haven't we had any updates in April. Because WINDOWS.

We're at a standstill until our windows arrive and they are supposed to be ready this coming week. I know this is a huge improvement over the multi-month waits during the pandemic, but I'm still impatient to get moving, since construction stopped 3 weeks ago while we just...wait. The next step is dry wall and that can't happen until windows (and an inspection, apparently). There's an additional complication--the patio door and transom windows above it won't be ready until June. Usually that's also required to pass this inspection. Our contractor is keeping his fingers crossed that we can get an "all but the doors" inspection to keep going with the construction. Because otherwise we're on hold until June. So...yeah, that's fun.

An update to our last post on metals - we took the safer route and returned to our preferred brushed nickel. After our contractor scared us away with a comment of "no one is asking for gold anymore" (something we don't think is true but was enough to spook us), we realizing we did not want to play into a fad. We know we like silvers and were struggling to match everything anyway, so brushed nickel it is. At least it will match the rest of the house.

One-Year Storm-i-versary

Last year, a big storm blew through that took our power out for over 24 hours. Funny enough, at the time, I waited to write a post about it because of a lingering issue post-storm that, it turns out, is still lingering. A year is long enough--let's get on with the post!

Having the electricity go out is not, in itself, much of an update. We've been pretty lucky due to the fact that our electrical circuit leads into the commercial part of town, so the few times we lose power, it usually comes back fast and is not worthy of a post. This time, however, we lost it for a while and we were READY! A few months before, we had purchased an electric vehicle (EV), as you may remember from this post about installing the EV charging station. At the time, D--in what turned out to be amazing foresight--also bought an adapter to allow our car to utilize its bidirectional charging capabilities. Meaning that power can also flow FROM the car to other things at 120V. This, it turned out, was fabulous timing.

A few hours into our black-out, we started to worry about how long our fridge would keep our food cold. Four hours, it turns out. A freezer will keep food safe for 24 to 48 hours, but a fridge (even without opening it and having it be pretty full) won't last long. That was, obviously, not great. But bring power in from the vehicle parked in the driveway and we were in the clear. The hardest part was pulling the fridge/freezer out from the wall. After that, we sent the charging cable from the driveway through the garage into the sunroom and then into the kitchen. 

Using a power strip, we also powered a small lamp and could charge our laptops and phones. It really felt like magic.

After charging up the fridge/freezer overnight and with no end to the blackout predicted, D rerouted the cables to go out the dining room window and drop down to the basement and through the door to give our basement chest freezer a burst of energy too. 

We were lucky that we got out of last storm season relatively unscathed but the heavy winds (or perhaps a flying branch) did manage to knock down one of our three chimney caps. We had them installed after a run-in with a raccoon more than 10 years ago, to make sure that no one else could decide to move in. The one that came down was the one mismatched one of the set of three, and we are pretty sure that it's the one that leads to the furnace, based on our drawings and understanding from that time period (I always swear I'm my own best reader!).

You can see from this picture (as storm clouds continued to roll through) that it's the back-most cap):

The problem is that our chimney sweep, who came to clean our chimneys last fall, said he couldn't get up there to replace it. He did say it was a good-quality cap and suggested it would be possible to paint it (presumably with something heat proof?) rather than replace it with a darker color to match.

All the chimney people look at our slate roof as a huge liability that they simply do not want to deal with and risk breaking. It doesn't help that the cherry tree in front of our house, exactly where they would want to put the ladder, has grown as well. Two companies later, we still haven't found anyone who wants to replace the chimney cap. We're not trying particularly hard, but any time we see someone working around town, we get them to come by and give a quote (a quote that remains: "no thanks, we can't do that job"). So here we are, approximately one year later with no resolution. Fortunately no critters have tried to move in yet.

Where to begin again...

Posts have been few and far between due to other priorities (knitting, anyone?), life events, and well, because we've been too busy doing things in our home to record them. But we have some big things on the horizon so I might as well catch up with the smaller things over the next few months and try to build some momentum so...hi. We're back.

It's growing season, so as any regular reader will know, it's time for a lawn and garden catch-up. But let's talk about some of the hardware on the way to the outside first. Last fall, we updated some fixtures that put the finishing touches on our siding refresh from spring. Our outdoor lights in the front seemed like they were probably from a discount value pack several decades ago. It was definitely time to swap them out for some curb appeal. The post itself also needed some refresh--it was showing signs of rusting at the top and bottom. I've spray painted it one already, probably almost 10 years ago now (but somehow I couldn't find a post for it when I looked), so that held up pretty well:

After a quick sand-down to remove some of the rust and a wipe with a damp clothed, I went to work applying a few thin coats:

More dramatically, D tackled the electrical work, replacing the topper with one made of clear glass and an Edison bulb (the kind with the exposed filament, a style we've turned to multiple times before, and which you will see again in a future post). This is actually the second post topper, as we originally bought one that was much too high and out of proportion with the rest of the lamp post.

Of course the rest had to be replaced to match! The lamp right next to the door came next:

As always, a mass of old, deteriorating wires greeted us. Nothing too surprising though, so we just proceeded with the new fixture.

Tah-dah! But wait, there's more!

We forgot to get a "before" picture for the light over the garage, but it was similar to the other two, with the plastic shade and black construction. The wires were less deteriorated than next to the front door, but just barely.

Now we have three lovely, matching exterior lights (though the lack of a more sealed-off receptacle does mean things get a little dusty inside).

Coincidentally with all that, our front door hardware abruptly failed one day, almost locking us out. It wasn't the Schlage auto-lock that died (which you might expect, given that it has a battery and small computer) but the mechanism in the doorknob itself that pulls back the latch bolt. It failed pretty spectacularly--D had to uninstall it immediately just so we could get in and out, so it became important that we replace it immediately (the dead bolt still worked independently, fortunately).

Once we went looking, we wondered why we hadn't replaced it sooner. All our front door hardware is brushed nickel, including the storm door handle and our smart lock, and yet we had inherited this oil-rubbed bronze pull (oddly paired with a nickel doorknob on the inside). Why had we kept it so long? I guess it simply wasn't something we had thought of. But the new fixture (on the right) is so much prettier.

Even better, we replaced the slippery inside knob with a lever. This works better for so many reasons! Easier for Grandma (arthritis), me (hand lotion and mittens/gloves), and the kids (tiny hands). Yet another thing we never really considered replacing and yet made a big difference. 

It took one extra try to get right--we were so un-used to levers that we selected the wrong one at first, and had to reinstall the second one that came in the box when we realized which way the lever is supposed to swoop:

And because this is the house of a knitter, it seemed like a good time to upgrade our door wreath too (partly because the UV effects on the old one made all the plastic so brittle it left piles on our floor every time we opened the door):

The lights and handle weren't cheap, but they weren't expensive either. One of those things that can make a big impact in tiny details that seem so obvious afterwards.

Next time, stay tuned for a big yard update as I try to get back in the swing of things.

All Charged Up

We recently got an electric vehicle--good timing as gas prices climb. We could charge it from the outlet in our garage with the included charger cable, but only at a rate of something like a 1-2% every hour. Fortunately, we had planned for this. Years ago, when we converted the breezeway to our sunroom and created and ran electricity to the attic, D--knowing that one day he would convince me to get an EV--had our contractors run a 240V line from the circuit box to the garage. It wasn't connected to anything, but the electrician at the time confirmed we have enough room in the circuit box to eventually activate it.

Fast forward almost six years and we had our E vehicle. We had an electrician come out and connect everything. He was impressed by our prescient decision to have that wired run back in 2016, now that copper wiring has quadrupled in price. He tied the cable into the circuit box and to our wallbox charging management system, a friendly looking glowing box that now lives just inside our garage door.

Next, we hd to get the cable outside, since our garage is really more of a workshop and certainly not a place to park our car. We laid out a garage door strip, cut out a channel, and ran the cable along it.

D created a cute little wooden guide with a copper bracket to keep the cable in place. The seal keeps the garage door about a half inch from the concrete floor and gives us exactly enough clearance for our cable.

Then D primed and painted a 4'' fence post to match the new pearl gray siding and topped with an adorable copper top. He also treated the bottom with something to protect it from the constant moisture of being buried in the ground.

I think it looks pretty nice, given that it's just there to hold up our charging cable.

For now at least, it's just sitting in probably a one-foot hole filled with gravel. This will apparently also help to keep the bottom from rotting by helping to drain rain water out into the dirt rather than sitting next to the post.

A clever and aesthetically pleasing solution to our new charging unit. 

Dark and Loud and Stinky and Spooky

 

As if on queue for Halloween, our house decided to become haunted. Or at least act like it was. First, the boiler started making really scary sounds, like an engine turning over. It started doing that a little bit last spring, and we only had just turned it on--apparently the problem got worse. It sounded dreadful and definitely like we should immediately turn off the system, which is what we did.

Even though we turned it off right away, the basement started to smell like oil. I was downstairs doing a workout so I noticed and got quite uncomfortable (and also a little nauseous). I brought down our air quality monitor (long story, was planning to write about it in a different, future post - just roll with it). It did indeed reflect something gross in the air, since this number is usually in the single digits.

We had someone come out and look at it today and he said that either the top (gray) box or the bottom (black) box is busted. We have to remember to go down there next time it makes that grinding motor sound and figure out which it is, and then he can come by and immediately replace it. So that's good, I guess.

During that same workout, just 10 minutes later, we heard a pop and the lights went out. Some transformer evidently had blown down the block. I guess I'm glad it was a sunny day because this was how I spent the last 20 minutes or so of my workout. At first I was afraid it was related to the boiler, but then I realized that didn't really make sense. Fortunately the power came back within a couple of hours, but I did have to spend 20 minutes in the basement where, the night before, I had seen but failed to kill a spider cricket.

Spooky!

Now let's just hope we can sort out that boiler.

The Magic Phrase is "Flickering Lights"

Well who knew we'd luck out and solve this problem so quickly (I mean, it has been going on for weeks but within about 12 hours of last night's blog post, we had an answer). So first, I have to fill in one detail that I left out last night because I didn't think it was relevant: a couple days into the patio build, we noticed some wires had been cut outside our house, probably by the big truck driving gravel to the back yard. A local electrician came by to make sure it wasn't live and said it was only an old phone line (given what minimal information I know about copper phone lines, this seemed logical).

Still, we had our utility service come out and check the pole as well. We were cleared and good to go--not an electrical issue. This seemed to support the fact that we weren't experiencing any outages (because if an electrical line to your house gets cut, you'd expect to lose power, right?). So we did all our due diligence and it seemed like a non-issue. When our power started acting just a tiny bit weird a couple days later, we honestly figured it couldn't be related, given all the professional opinions. Anyway, thanks to the magic of 20/20 hindsight, it turns out this fact is pretty important. 

After an email to the electrician last night to mention that the situation seemed to have worsened and that now our lights were flickering pretty badly, he agreed to come take another look since it sounded bad. After less than 5 minutes and without him even coming into the house, we had a new diagnosis. He pointed to the pole outside our house. A silver wire was hanging free, right next to the pole (we thought that was just a "support wire" for the power). He said that it was the neutral and it was broken. 

It turns out, if you lose the neutral, the circuit will complete by running through the ground, attached to a water pipe, to a neighbor's house and use THEIR neutral. So that's a LOT more resistance, which means high power appliances like microwaves and dryers will struggle to get enough electricity. He said to call the power company and say we were experiencing flickering lights at the triplex.

When we called to report the problem this time,  we realized that the utility even had a voice prompt for "flickering lights." Apparently that was the word to use--and the word we didn't use three weeks ago when we called them to check on the broken line (because, at the time we weren't experiencing any problems). Needless to say, they were outside our house within a couple of hours.

And lo and behold, full power! Dryer, garbage disposal, microwave, all running at the same time and the office power stayed on! Not to mention the dryer and the microwave sound a lot happier and higher powered.

So we have an unnecessary microwave now, but I guess seven years isn't that crazy for a replacement. Given that the electrician didn't charge us for any of his two house calls, I'd say we came out ahead on this one.

It's Getting Worse

So this electricity thing. Of course the house would start falling apart right after a big, elective upgrade. Here's what's happened so far--

• A day or two into the new patio build, the landscaping company accidentally cut a wire to our house. We had it checked out and were told it was just an old copper phone line, so we dismissed everything that followed as unrelated.
• About three weeks ago, a couple days after the phone line was cut, we started noticing that the lights beginning to flicker pretty dramatically.
• After about a week of making sure we weren't crazy or needed our eyes checked, we tentatively linked the flickering to using the microwave, but we still weren't certain. The office was affected, with the computer plugged into a powerstrip attached to one of the sockets being forcibly shut down. No circuits in the basement were tripping but a GFCI was. 
• Then the same thing happened, but the light didn't start working again when we reset the GFCI. That brings us to where we were during my last post about the issue.
• D did some reading and consulting and decided that the microwave was the likely (and also cheapest, though microwaves aren't exactly "cheap" culprit). So we ordered one.
• He also solved the problem with the light in the office with some tinkering that required only minor electrical work and therefore was permissible according to my general sense of things you should and should not attempt with no professional training:
• Apparently, you can test the switch when the electricity is off, to see if it still can conduct power. This switch, apparently, failed the continuity test (see the 1? that means no continuity, even though it was switched on):

• A new switch that we just happened to have in the garage passed the continuity test with those 000s when the switch is in the "on" position.
  

• So D swapped out the switches and suddenly the light worked. Go us! And with a new microwave on the way, we figured we were on our way to solving this.
• Then the microwave arrived. We took a quick peek behind the wall before they put the new one in, just to make sure there wasn't any kind of visible issue there that could have caused the microwave to break. Nope, all good:

• So we have this new microwave (we selected that microwave like we select pretty much everything these days, by seeing what the Wirecutter recommends and buying it, because we're lazy. We decided to final switch from black (to match our oven and dishwasher) to stainless steel (to match our fridge) in the hopes that eventually we will end up with everything being stainless.

• And guess what. The new microwave solved literally nothing. Not only didn't it fix the existing flickers, but they seem like they are getting worse. Now we can consistently predict that the office will short whenever we start the dryer and even sometimes when the heat clicks on.The garbage disposal even significantly dims the lights.

An electrician came out to take a look and he checked the circuit box, tightened some things, and confirmed that all of these things are on separate circuits. Other than that, he had truly no idea what to do. He didn't charge for the visit, at least.

Then today, turning on the dryer even made the living room lights turn off, then on, then off, then on again. This problem seems to be spreading and we have no more leads and an unnecessary microwave (we actually miss our old one, but oh well).

Any ideas? Besides trying a new electrician.

Of course something would break

Of course we'd have a sudden house issue exactly when we're in the midst of an expensive elective upgrade. On Friday, we noticed the under-cabinet lights flickering in the kitchen while we were preparing lunch. Then this week, we started to notice that the flickering seemed to sync up to when we were running the microwave. And the microwave was sounding a little loud.

It seemed pretty ignorable though. Maybe a weird power draw, yes, but ignorable.

Tonight though, the office power went out when we reheated dinner. Uh...ok this has officially escalated to no-longer-ignorable. The microwave seems to be the culprit:

But, I said, our microwave is pretty new! It can't be the microwave! How long is a microwave supposed to last? Well thanks to this blog, I was able to tell pretty quickly how old the microwave was. Seven years old. To the month. To which I thought, "See? That's too new to need replacing."

Google, however, has other ideas:

Touché, Google. 

And given this last year, let's just say that we're using it a whole lot more than we used to, since we're home and preparing food ALL.THE.TIME.

The problem now appears that the light in the office will no longer turn on, even after we reset all the GFCIs that were tripped. We tried replacing the bulbs just in case those were at fault. But no.

So we're left with a conundrum of whether to buy a microwave or hire an electrician. It seems like the internet agrees that our microwave should not be on the same circuit as other normal things like lamps and outlets, so that might require some electrical work. And this light might be completely busted. D suggested taking the fixture off to test if the wires were still working, but that feels like a step too far in the "leave for a professional" direction. We change fixtures, but only when the circuits are off. Deliberately turning them on to test whether the electricity is flowing is where I draw the line. And so it's a chicken and egg problem: do we call the electrician or replace the microwave?

(For better or worse, we made a decision: new microwave arriving on Monday.)
 

"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.)