Electrician-ing

 I am considering starting each blog post with a quote from a famous Stoic, thanks to the handy app I recently discovered.  Starting right now.

"The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts:  Therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature." - Marcus Aurelius.

 In the previous looooong post, I mentioned at some point that I intended to install a digital timer on the fart fan in the shop bathroom.  The digital timer arrived in the mail today, and I woke up quite a bit earlier than needed for night shift - so I got busy at my other job. 

 

Refrigerator Ice Maker woes...

The ice maker in our 14 year old Sears Kenmore side-by-side quit working recently.

Drywall and finish work

I finished painting and trimming the utility room.

Drywall :(

I've been doing a bit of drywall the past couple of days.

Heating the house

I want to talk a bit about home heating.  I'm not an expert, but I've done a little research into it, and thought it would be good to share what I've learned.  I have a similar post about home cooling here.

Overhauling the cat tree

A couple of years ago, we were about to have guests over, and I realized how awful the cat tree looked.  We quickly purchased a second cat tree, and vowed to replace the carpet and rope on the previous one at some point.

Back Yard Landscaping - four days of moving dirt and finished! *Updated*

We've had a difficult landscaping situation out back since we moved into this house.  The walkways were gravel, weeds, and stones.  It has been an ongoing battle keeping up with the weeds.

Ongoing Backyard Landscaping

I took care of a fairly minor project today.  I didn't have a lot of time or I would have accomplished quite a bit more.  Even though it was pretty minor task, I still got pretty hot and sweaty.

More Deck Maintenance - and a few other repairs

The other post about staining the deck is here:  However a lot more work was needed.

Staining the Deck

Staining the deck is an annual or biennial (every other year) chore that I really don't care much for.

Backyard Landscaping

We've been in this house for over six years now.  I've wanted to work on the back yard for a long time, but other issues have been more pressing, and the household budget is always a consideration!

This past week we finally got serious about it.

Hot Water - not!

No, I'm not in trouble... at least no more so than usual.

Supplemental Shop Lighting

The roll-up door in the shop is opened by an industrial type chain-drive opener.  Although it's industrial, it still has a standard socket for a light bulb.  Unfortunately, like most modern fixtures, the light bulb socket is only rated for 60 Watts.

Spring Vacation 2018, Part 2

Part 1 is here:

I did not complete the big project I was working on during vacation in March.  It was a little discouraging.  I was uncertain about my skills building and hanging the doors on the new cabinets, so I held back from doing that.

Fixing the starting system on the F-250

I have a diesel 3/4 ton truck, a Ford F-250.  The previous owner had an anti-theft and alarm system installed on it after he purchased it.  The anti-theft system began giving me trouble, and at one point, I had to disconnect the alarm in the middle of the Wal-Mart parking lot, because it wouldn't stop making racket.

The Cub Cadet Mower

I own a couple of riding mowers.  I use one for the lawn, and another one for the rest of the property.  The mower that goes out in the field is the Cub Cadet.  It gets beat up pretty badly, because I often hit rocks, stumps, and branches that are not visible in the grass.  Sometimes I high-center it and the blades whirl around in the dirt and gravel until I can get them stopped.

Home Projects - refurbishing a rocker

A relative has been keeping some stuff in my shop.  One of these items was an outdoor glider rocker that was in bad shape.  I had promised a while back that I would refurbish it for them.

Insulation

Last autumn, I had an electric garage heater installed.

The reason I thought that we needed a garage heater is because we keep a second refrigerator in the garage.  I wasn't sure what would happen if the outside of that refrigerator dropped below freezing.  I suspect that the cold would have seeped in and frozen everything inside. 

For that reason we put in the garage heater.  It keeps the garage above 40 degrees, and now we are able to store canned goods out there in cabinets as well.  However...

One part of the garage wasn't insulated, and that was the garage doors.  I am not sure what the r-value of 1/16" sheet metal is, but it probably isn't very good :).  We went through last winter without insulation on the garage doors, and the heater ran quite a bit.  Electricity is cheap here, but it's still wasteful to let all that heat escape.

This season I decided to insulate the garage doors, and found some cool styrofoam panels to do the job.  The panels are made by a company called Matador.  The front side is covered with a vinyl cloth, and the back side is scored so that you can break it off at the desired height.  Below is a picture of the back side of a panel.

I got to work, and it was pretty easy.

 

Here is how it turned out.  It took about an hour and a half to insulate the doors of a 3 car garage.  In this case, each panel had to be cut down somewhat to fit.  I am pretty pleased with the fit and finish.  Also, as a bonus, the doors open and close *much* more quietly! 



The biggest pain in the butt was clean-up.  It was impossible to get all the little styrofoam boogers cleaned up. They have a lot of static cling, and were still hanging from the inside of the garage doors when I rolled them up.

I ended up sweeping up as much as possible, then I used a leaf blower to knock them off the doors.  Afterwards I used the leaf blower to blow them out of the garage, because by then they had gone everywhere :)

The garage holds heat into the night-time quite a bit longer than it did before, and so I expect that the heater will be running a lot less often. 

Pantry and Linen Closet upgrades

Several months ago, we decided that the kitchen pantry and the upstairs linen closets needed to be improved.  Both had shelving that only came partway to the front of the closet, so we were losing about a foot of shelving on each of the 4 shelves. 

Furthermore, because we have 9 foot ceilings in these closets, there was room for an additional partial shelf above the others. 

I had cut shelving to fit into these spaces quite a while back, and the wife had begun to paint them with primer, but she ran out of primer, and other (way larger) projects got started.  The shelves sat half-primered in the furnace room as we carpeted, framed and drywalled the basement.

This past week though, I finally put the half-finished shelves on saw-horses in the garage and set the garage heater on high, to get everything up to painting temperature.  Over two days, I painted the interior of the linen closet and pantry, completed priming and painting the shelves, and installed new footer boards for the top shelf in each closet.  The shelves fit in nicely with no further cutting, and are screwed down to the footer boards.

Each closet turned out pretty well, and I figure with the additional front-to-back area and extra shelf, it works out to gaining about extra 2 shelves per closet.   A good thing, because right now this house is very low on installed cabinetry.

Carpentry

Carpentry is probably not a word I would use to describe my efforts with wood.  My work is rough and imperfect.  I give myself passing grades though.  I'm not too much worse than people who do this for a living.

The basement has a bay-window shaped nook that sits directly below the breakfast nook.  When we had the big room in the basement drywalled, this nook became a storage area.  However it was a storage area without any shelves.  After doing the master closet rebuild I felt pretty competent to install shelving in this room. 

The job was far more complex than the master closet though.  This was mainly due to the angles involved and the need to cut several shelves to line up correctly to the wall, and also to each other.  I lucked out, and managed to get all six shelving pieces fit in correctly the first time.  Here are some pictures of the finished project.  There were no right angle cuts on these shelves!

Looking in:

 Bottom shelf, made from three pieces.

Looking up at the support brackets.

Not a carpenter, but not a complete loss either!