Artificial (un)Intelligence

In addition to relying on professional help to keep our lives a little saner, we also turned to robotics to eliminate some of the boring chores that needed to get done. Enter: iRobot's Roomba 805, a Costco-only model in the 800-series. That means improved suction, scheduling (run on Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon, for example), the ability to identify and concentrate on particularly dirty areas, a bumper to stop it from damaging anything it bangs into, and a sensor to say when the bin is full. It does not hook up to wifi or "learn" your house, but its bumper and sensors are supposed to make it smart enough to trace the walls, clean the middles, and no what *not* to do (like wedge itself onto or under something where it can get trapped).

Having used it for a couple of months now I can say that we are not particularly impressed. It has reduced the need for me to vacuum, so in that sense it has succeeded. However, its stupidity and repeated failures, along with its very loud noise, makes us consider whether or not we really want to keep it around.

An example:

The Rock N Play, we decided, is Roomba kryptonite. It finds it every time and can't resist trying to hop the rockers. We've have to move it to the hallway on cleaning days (we only have the Roomba doing the main square of the main floor, i.e. kitchen, dining room, living room, sun room), stick it on top of tables, anything to get it out of the way. Fortunately by now, baby has transitioned away from it so we won't have it around as an obstacle anymore.

We do, however, have no intention of getting rid of our sofa...

It seems to either wedge itself in and get stuck or make its way underneath (if the sofa is pushed far enough back from the rug) and then find itself unable to get out. Either way, it means cleaning has ended.

There was also that time the "invisible fence" got turned off and it really tried to make a break for it, though really Roomba isn't to blame for that one:

And then there's the permanent wood stain damage from when a (brand new) battery leaked out of the other invisible fence while it was sitting up on our cabinets. Ugh! Again, maybe more the fault of Duracell than Roomba:

Another complaint that I have with Roomba is how many "rug turds" we get on the floor after it finishes vacuuming. I think this is because we have a new rug in the sun room that keeps shedding, but I still don't understand why it just drags those little things around everywhere on its bottom brushes and can't suck them up like, you know, a vacuum:

Finally, my perhaps most significant complaint is how annoyingly noisy it is. We can't really watch TV or have a quiet conversation while it's running (though it is so oddly hypnotic to watch that maybe we don't need to). This shouldn't be a problem since we set it to run during the day when we're out. But once it gets stuck on or under something, it stops. If that happens early enough in the cycle, then the house doesn't get cleaned. And so we have to run it that evening (or, *gasp* take out the real vacuum).

So what to do? We like the idea of having a robot cleaner, but I'm not sure we love our actual Roomba. Upgrading would get us a few smart features, but for quite a bit more money AND wouldn't solve the noise issue. We're considering taking the advice of our favorite home review website The Sweet Home and buying a different brand that is significantly cheaper and quieter. Even if it's just as stupid, the $200 smaller price tag and the fact that we probably could run it at night means it might be worth it.

Do you rely on robots to clean your house? What are your experiences with them?

An Organized Kitchen

One room that needed the expert help of the Container Store consultation was our kitchen. It wasn't horrible, but we knew that there had to be ways to improve where we stored things - ways to gain space and put things more easily in reach.

Rather than tell you about some of the general suggestions our consultant suggested, I'll go right to before and after pictures. We reorganized about a month ago now, so I can say with certainty that these solutions seem to be working for us, at least for now.

The corner cabinet - this contained all our tupperware, stacked by size with the lids below the containers. We constantly had to shift everything around to get to the size we needed and it was a pain to put things away, but it seemed like the best use of space for that awkward corner space. On the second shelves were all our glass lunch containers, stacked very precariously, and then other lesser used containers behind and above (the top shelf is not reachable without a stool):

The after shot - spices down below, on a fancy lazy susan that pulls out to get to the things in the center of the circle. It's organized in quarters with similar spices together (for us thats: herbs, indian spices, hot spices, and "pumpkin pie" spices). We lowered the next shelf down a bit so we could more easily reach the largest size tupperware, which is the only tupperware on the shelf. A few assorted containers are behind and above, including jars that were scattered throughout the kitchen.

The narrow cabinet - filled completely with spices (with a list on the door of what we have). We largely found things by memory of what the bottle looks like and approximately where we put it, but it was chaos in there and usually searching for one meant having to shuffle around a bunch of jars.

After - a big piece of advice the consultant gave us was to split up our tupperware and put one or two sizes per shelf, to make it easier to grab what we need rather than having to shuffle them around. That made the narrow spice cabinets perfect for this purpose. So we have the small size on the bottom and the medium just above. Baking supplies are still on top, though we moved the more common ingredients over to the edges of the spice lazy susan (baking soda, baking powder, and corn starch).

Now to the counter - one thing we hoped to accomplish was to clear some space, so the first to go was this spice rack, now that we managed to consolidate it all into the cupboard:

That allowed us to bring the bottle drying rack closer to the sink (you can't see it in the above picture but it was to the left of the knives very far from the washing area). We would have put it right next to the sink but I like having the tea kettle as a buffer because sometimes we wash things that should definitely NOT have any risk of splattering onto drying baby bottles, like dishes and cutting boards contaminated with raw meats. The rice cooker moved down from its spot next to the stove (you can see it up in the very first picture, with its lid open).

This is where the pictures get a little haphazard. You see when we started organizing, we didn't think we'd get through the whole plan at once. But inspiration (and long well-timed naps from both the child AND the infant) meant that we did more than we thought. Which meant we didn't really get thorough "before" pictures.  But here is one cabinet in the microwave area, being used really poorly. We had child plates here, because the drawer in the desk where said child could get her own place settings did not have room for plates. Then we had a cheese and vegetable grater that we rarely used, and then some random jars above. Inside the closed cabinets were an eclectic mix of larger spices, some tea cups, some containers, etc.

Our consultant advised us to keep our lunch containers separate from our other tupperware and easily accessible. So we rearranged the drawers to make room for the kid plates, to further allow our kid to start setting her own place at the table. The tiny kid lunch containers got put on the bottom shelf and our got put on the middle. Top shelf (largely inaccessible) still contained random containers. We seriously cleaned out the cabinet above the microwave and moved a bunch of jars of grains and legumes there, which had been accumulating in a very visible spot near the cookbooks.

 Moving over to there (completely lacking a before picture) - a very picturesque view of the cookbooks we use most often on the bottom and rarely (i.e. when the kids are grown up and we have time again) on top. The jars of stuff got moved away to the top of the microwave, freeing up space for the coffee grinder and milk frother. We use these fairly regularly but they were taking up a lot of real estate on the counter and are easy to move back and forth. It looks so much nicer now that this might be the best visual improvement on the whole re-organization (so of that would be the one that we forgot to photograph....)

Here's the view, in the end. The rice cooker moved out from being cramped next to the toaster oven, the toaster oven got turns to make more workable counter space, the utensils got to go live back next to the stove (they used to live to the right of the stove but once we opened up that space to the new room, I was afraid we would walk past them and knock them down so they had been banished over to the other side of the sink where they weren't useful). We removed the spice rack, the coffee grinder, and the milk frother from the counter and saved ourselves a lot of hassle of finding tupperware by shuffling things around in the corner cabinet. Our kid can now get to her own plates as well as her other dishes, and everything looks a little nicer. Whew! Not bad for one afternoon.

So, funny enough, this kitchen update might have been the most useful part of hiring an organization consultant. Someone with enough distance and experience to suggest new ways to use the space we already had. One month out, we're really happy with these small changes that made a big difference. And the only thing we ended up buying for it was one lazy susan.

The rest of the office

The closet solution is holding up well and we are still putting things away there and keeping the rest of the house relatively toy free, so I call that a success (even if we're only talking about a couple of weeks). The room, however, is far from done. With no desk and no seating except one very random desk chair, it doesn't really have a purpose except storage of things (file cabinet, yarn trunk, etc.):

Our Container Store organizer suggested using Elfa along the wall to create a sort of versatile desk space, something like this crafting area from the below catalog picture:

Using Elfa in a similar way would mean we could have drawers and shelves below, a surface top at whatever level we want (we were thinking of doing a standing desk, for example), shelving up above, and have it all be customizable and changeable. In particular, she suggested, to use the above catalog picture as an example, of doing a split surface top, so that one could be an adult height and one could be lowered when toddler starts wanting to craft in there or do homework, to create a second, lower desk space alongside the higher one. Drawers, shelves, etc. can all shift around to compensate.

Here was the plan she created, for the wall currently occupied by the china-cabinet looking shelving unit with doors and the desk chair:

We like it, but we don't love it. It does keep all the equipment off of the floor and above the baseboard heater, so that is nice. It does provide a decent amount of storage and desk space. It does not, however, look nice. A simple fact of these systems, as you can see from our closet photos and the catalog picture above is that it just is not very attractive. Closet organization? You bet! Centerpiece of a room? Ehhhhhh, maybe not. There's a reason that we used the Elfa skeleton for the living room but stained wood for the shelving ourselves and used a completely different system for the cupboards below. We actually wanted it to look nice.

So we think that in the end this is not the way to go. While amazingly functional, it is a little too functional for us. The plan for now is to clear out the china cabinet of books, magazines, and binders from college. Then buy a very simple standing height desk that is just 4 legs and a surface, to go along that wall exactly where the Elfa system would be. We plan to put toy boxes, along the lines of those blue lego boxes (see top photo) and other modular pieces below. It's not hugely elegant but we can pick whatever kind of simple desk we want and balance design and function. If we go 100% functional (read: ugly) then at least it won't be a $500 system. 

That's the plan at least. We surprised ourselves by finding no good solutions at our good old standby, Ikea. So if nothing easy surfaces, I can imagine going the Elfa route. Either way though, we plan to empty out the cabinet and get rid of it to free up space along the wall and then go from there.

A Thing of Beauty

The boxes were unpacked...The mess got worse before it got better. But in the end, we have a closet.

Elfa was indeed easy to install, as we remembered from when we did the living room. Small details, however, seemed pointlessly cheap, especially considering how much the whole system cost. For example, we have shelf liners, but they were not pre-cut for our shelves (they pre-cut other things, like the horizontal and vertical tracks). So I had to try to trim them with scissor and an x-acto knife but couldn't really get them precise enough to lay flat without over-cutting.

The cover for the top track also needs to be trimmed, and the top of the drawers need to be stuck on with (literally) tiny squares of double-sided tape. These things all could use improving.

However, the closet it done and already in use! We also coincidentally inherited a cute rainbow set of drawers from family, and my toddler loves both and is eager to put things away (I'm sure this will fade, but I'll take it for as long as it lasts).

We have the door of the closet set up with a hanging area and a deep container for crafts.

Inside the closet - shelves, drawers, and a hanging rack (for now I've just got some smocks and a halloween costume there, alongside the drawers).

We haven't decided what to put on the top shelves so obviously out of reach of the toddler (and to a large extent out of our reach as well without a step-stool). So there's more space once we figure out what to do with it.

The real question - did it work? Are we more organized? Well, there's certainly no guarantee that we'll continue to put things back into the closet, but at least a space exists for toys where it did not previously. I think this before and after puts how far we've come into perspective (keeping in mind that it got way worse in the weeks leading up to the new closet while I decided it was futile to keep obsessively stacking things just to free up floor space, knowing a solution was in sight).

The office last week:

 The office today:

There's plenty more to do, along the main wall, as well as some additional big storage boxes we need for legos and other things, but hey, there's a floor now.

Dream Closet

One of the unexpected conclusions of our consultation with the Container Store "professional organizer" was to make better use of the space we had. So though she suggested a complicated redo of the main wall of the office, we decided to use her side point to take our clean-up in a new direction: the closet.

With a shoe rack on the door that we inherited from the previous owners (a very inefficient circular knitting needle holder) and a simple shelf and hanging bar, this became the closet for coats that were out of season and original boxes for things we felt we needed original boxes for.

The bottom was beach stuff (collapsible chair, umbrella, etc.) and also the place where we piled items we planned to donate.

In short, not a very good use of space.

And because we were now on the Container Store's mailing list (tricky how they get you like that), we saw a catalog image that we fell in love with:

So well organized! So efficient! Be still my heart! (I realize that no child will ever put his or her things away that well, but please allow me a moment to dream.) We decided this would be a much better use of space than the single bar/high shelf that we had going in there already.

We took some measurements (our space is smaller than the closet in the model picture) and chatted with a store consultant until we got a customized plan and a list of parts. We had a few obstacles - literally and figuratively. First we had the top shelf of the closet, which was resting on 2x4s nailed into the wall. Those boards would have to go. Second, the back wall of our closet had two plumbing access panels (one deliberate, for the bathroom plumbing, and one accidental from when a plumber had to put a hole in the wall to get to a pipe). The elfa system at the Container Store works by installing a top track into studs and then hanging everything from it. So the wall has to be flat. No access doors or other boards.

So instead of making ours exactly like the picture (or at least as close as possible as the size of our closet would allow), we added rolling drawers instead of drawers attached to the backbone tracks of the elfa system. Like this on the back wall:

Here's the shelving wall view:

And here is the door, pretty much exactly like the picture (because door sizes are standard). They convinced me that we can use an "over the top of the door" attachment, but I'm not sure we have enough space for it, so fingers crossed.

At any rate, it was time to start cleaning out the closet before we committed to our several hundred dollar reorganization. Could we even get the closet into the initial shape it needed??

Step one, take out junk - a relatively easy step now that we have the garage attic. And pull off the shoe rack:

Step two (and the step we had to complete before we were willing to order the system) - pry off the boards that were holding the top shelf in place. D was unable to find any nail holes when he poked around, but finally was able to pull them off with a crowbar.

No surprise - it left lots of holes in the walls. But at least now we knew that we could get even walls with no obstacles in the way of the elfa hanging tracks (I'll talk about that more in the installation phase).

We debated trying to patch the big hole on the right, to give us more wall from which to hang drawers and shelving:

 D tried to cut straight edges out of the hole to make patching easier, but it just wasn't happening:

It did make us wonder exactly what kind of walls we have in this house. It definitely isn't drywall but the lath structure we expected to see just isn't there - no framing at all. It looks like drywall layered onto plaster layered onto drywall. Huh? In any case, it was thick and unfriendly looking, and we decided that it simply wasn't worth the effort. This is just a closet after all.

So we decided that if we were going to leave the panel in place, we could put trim around it just like on the panel to the left, so they matched and felt a bit more...deliberate. Here's the left panel:

D bought some trim at Home Depot, pulled out the mitre box, and got to work. Here's the first edge nailed up:

 Then side two and some wood filler. Once it's painted you would never guess it wasn't intentional:

Fast forward a few more days of more spackle and wood filler followed by two layers of Kilz primer (we only cut in once on the edges but D rolled twice), and a layer of Sherwin Williams base white in satin that we had lying in our basement. The closet is a clean canvas ready to go!

Which is good, because I think our work is just getting started...

Resolved

2017 is here so it's time to look back at last year's goals and set some new ones for this year. In looking at how we did, I see we managed to reach both our top-2, so that's pretty good! 

The first (in case you don't want to click back) was to undergo our most extensive remodel to-date and convert the breezeway into an indoor space. Done and done! And we couldn't be happier. I was skeptical that the project would be worth the price tag but it turns out that has become one of our favorite rooms of the house. And the additional attic space that we created overhead has had a follow-on effect that has let us move junk out of other rooms to hide up there, freeing up space in the garage and the basement too. Hurray!

The second goal was to hire cleaning help. Well we went through 3 cleaning people but finally found someone that we like (plus a back-up if necessary). I'm happy to report that I haven't scrubbed a toilet in about a year now (I just put away tons of baby and toddler messes all day, every day). Worth it! I don't think I can go back to cleaning all by myself. Now can they just come nightly to cook me dinner?

Goal 3, converting to natural gas, turns out to be impossible without some very pricy structural changes. We had someone come look and because our furnace is right below our kitchen window, it's not a simple matter of just bringing the gas line to the house and switching out the appliances.

Goal 4 - those darn doors again! It's been on the list since 2013 and apparently will be for yet another year...

Enough looking back, time to look forward - 

1. 2. and 3. Organize, organize, organize! This is going to be an ongoing theme for the year, and one we started about a month ago. This is a multi-step plan to thin out what we have plus put it away more efficiently. We have blueprints, we have items in our shopping cart, and we have weekend plans to tackle the toy problem (i.e. the office), the linen closet, and the kitchen.

4. Automate and make life easier - this one is already mostly accomplished thanks to a purchase we made a few days ago (does that count? it's like making a to-do list just for the satisfaction of crossing things off). Stay tuned for an update later this month.

5. Fix the doorbell. It's annoying. But it is also probably expensive.

Happy 2017! Do you have any house-related resolutions?

Happy Holidays!

New decorations this year - window wreaths to match the door wreaths (so thrilled that Pottery Barn got them back in stock!), and one of those red/green laser lights. Of course with a toddler who loves Christmas lights, we had to put out everything. The lights are mismatched and the application is sloppy but hey it's the twinkle that counts.

Indoors, we moved the tree to the fireplace wall (we rotate every once in a while, it seems) and went with silver ribbons instead of red. We got a new star when the old one decided not to turn on. Most exciting - with our family complete, we all got new stockings thus forever christening us as Mommy and Daddy.

Our village inherited an ice rink (we mostly keep it off because it plays music continuously when on) and our thrilled toddler helped me set the whole thing up and requested "more people" (little does she know that this village is just a small subset of the stuff I keep at my parents' house...). The cats aren't thrilled to lose their window seat but have found other places to sleep for the holiday season, fortunately.

From our family to yours, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Dead as a Door...bell

Can you tell the difference between these two pictures? It's more obvious in person:

On the top, our doorbells is glowing. On the bottom, it isn't.

Right around when we were getting the electrical work redone for our new room, our doorbell stopped working. There had been a short - the crew admitted to that. Though they didn't think the two were related.

Well whatever it was, we now have no electrical power to the doorbell, which had magically just worked, emitting a constant glow and chiming an actual manual bell.

Our electrician friend managed to get it working partially - one of the two bell tones seemed permanently fried but the other started working  if the whole unit was loaded up with C batteries. So we got a "ding" instead of a "ding dong." That seemed a decent fix.

 The problem was that it was short-lived. Within a week or two, the doorbell was dead again.

Apparently the constant glow sucks up 4 C batteries in about 10 days. Obviously not something we wanted to sustain.

So we're back to no doorbell. This has not been a bad thing what with a newborn napping at various points of the day. But because it's there and people expect it to work, it has also meant that we haven't always answered for people we actually want to see, like our neighbors (by now I think most of them know it's broken). I probably at least should put a little sign on it or a piece of tape.

The options now are to purchase a fake add-on bell or pay an electrician to fix it, which might involve a whole new unit and new wiring. Neither are great solutions. Since the builders for the new room denied it was related even then, I don't think we can convince them now to come fix it, so we are on our own for whatever costly solution we decide on.

But I miss that glow...