We now have a nice new kitchen. In fact, although I haven't blogged about his in ages, we have about 98% of a nice new house, only about a year and a half behind schedule. This means there is less daily angst, but there is more to clean. An article with the enticing title of How to Speed-Clean Your Kitchen thus seems very enticing.
Alas, step one reads like this:
1. Fill sink to the rim with very hot water; add one cup regular bleach. Soak for one hour.Now I'm sure this is fine advice but anything that takes an hour and then requires several more steps is not my idea of speed cleaning.
2. Drain and rinse thoroughly.
3. Scrub with Ajax, Bon Ami, or baking soda.
4. Be sure to rinse thoroughly.
5. Shine with Windex or another glass-cleaning spray. Dry thoroughly.
We started our rather extreme home renovation project a mere 15 months ago. The contractor predicted it would take eight months. Admittedly we did have three hurricane scares along the way which required we demobilize, setting back the schedule. Even so, it’s been a long time.
The interior of our home is now 95% finished, and what’s done is on the whole very nice. But random things remain to be done here and there in every room, most cosmetic, a few rather more functional. The exterior is less far along, as the stucco guy left two walls looking tumorous, and other one quite poorly patched. So that needs sorting before painting. And the front of the house is still a gravel pit. I have some faith that our contractor, a man with pride of craft, will make it good in the end. Eventually.
The problem is that as we get closer to completion, the work gets done asymptotically slower. Yesterday, the foreman announced that he would be on our job every day until it finished. Today, no one turned up.
Which is perhaps why I took little joy in this otherwise amusing story, Fort Pierce homeowner gets free roof after contractor mixes up addresses. I can just imagine our work crew somewhere else…
For the next two nights we’ll be unhomed as they are going to varnish the floors with something that is awful to breath but lovely to look at. We had hoped to be at this stage about, oh, last summer, when it would have been far less disruptive to our lives, but there you are.
The good news is that this milestone means there are only a few major stages to go in our project: painting the inside and out of the old half of the house (we’re living in the new half now), building the new driveway, doing all the little things that got skipped along the way, and fixing the mistakes that are fixable (so far there appear to be remarkably few mistakes, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to fix). Then it’s getting the stuff out of storage, figuring where it goes, window treatments, and landscaping. At this rate, I feel confident that we will be in position to have ‘Housewarming - The ReBoot’ this calendar year!
Coincidentally, the law school will also be closed for part of the long weekend because one of the buildings has to be tented for termites.
It’s moving day today: we’re taking all our stuff from the front half of the house where we’ve been living for a year in cramped conditions, and moving to the brand new back half of the house, where we will live in cramped conditions while the front half is rehabbed. In theory this rehab process should only take a month. Or two. Or who knows. Anyway, no posting today unless I have a lot more pep than I expect to still have after dinner.
I ordered, and was properly billed and invoiced for, a patch panel . It was delivered while I was away. When I opened the box, I found that I was sent a piece of metal with holes in it.
Grrrrr. Nobody at Lanshack is home today, it being a federal holiday, but tomorrow they better sort this out.
Update: While I was writing this, someone from Lanshack answered my email from this morning. It’s a model of how to deal with an error:
We obviously made an error and sent you the wrong patch panels. I can ship you the correct (loaded) cat 5e patch panels on Tuesday (7/5) and they would arrive to you on Friday (7/9). Would this work for your schedule?
As for the return of the other panels; if I were to send you a UPS prepaid return label by email would you be able to print and attach it to the package and give it to a UPS driver?
I apologize for the error and any inconvenience that it may have caused you.
And it’s even signed by a particular employee, in case I want to follow up.
Mistakes happen to anyone—and this is much better coping than you often see.
Our home remodelling project is advancing, but slowly. This week they put on the doors and windows in the new part of the house (we are still in Phase I: build new part; Phase II is ‘rehab old part’; we were supposed to be finished with it all by now.) The plumbing and electric is mostly done and the ducting. If all goes well, the network guy is coming Real Soon Now to wire the home network…
Meanwhile I have to spec out the equipment. We settled on structured cat 5e cable that will handle phones and the network. I think I’ve picked a router and a switch, although I haven’t ordered either. The old wireless router and switch will be relegated to serving as a mere access point and run off a different part of the network.
I ordered patch panels and also a wall mount for them as I still don’t have a clear idea of what sort of rack or other platform I need to hold the gear. Something pint-sized compared to the professional gear, I’d imagine. Maybe this?
The gear is going to live wedged in a very wide closet about 26”deep, with the patch panel living on the 26” wall. In the fullness of time it may hold more switches, a server or two, some phone gear, and who knows what. I think I want a rack with wheels rather than the kind you screw into the floor and (9’) ceiling, but beyond that there seem to be a bewildering number of choices, all of which need accessories to hold anything.
Of course, I won’t get to use any of this stuff until that side of the house has the electricity turned on and is ready to move into. I just hope that installing the new network doesn’t require pulling the plug on the existing, temporary, DSL connection. If it does, I may have to try pointing a Pringles can at the University.
First we put half our stuff in storage. Then we moved into the front half of the house, about the size of a NY two-bedroom apartment, putting the kids into a bunk bed. The idea was to start the project in the fall, and finish by about, well, May or June. Then we had permit delays. Then, finally, in January we knocked down the empty half of our house — including a piece of the kitchen — so we could rebuild it better and bigger. Then they started to build, poured a foundation, built some walls, and almost a month ago got ready to pour the beam and install the trusses.
But wait! We failed inspection! The city of Coral Gables has tougher requirements than the County and even though these were noted on the plans, the engineer just did the routine calculations. Three week delay to recalculate, get twice as many trusses, re-inspect. Ok, that takes us to last week. Good to go to pour some beams, right?
Oops. Seems there’s a cement shortage. As the contractor tells it, there were three local plants that supplied about 60% of south Florida’s needs with the rest coming from abroad. Most of the imported stuff is being diverted to other places, like China, that are willing to pay higher prices than Florida (!). And all three of the local plants are having mechanical problems. The biggest plant has problems so severe that the owners have decided not to repair it, but just to wait for the new plant to come on stream in about a month.
So after a few days extra delay we managed to get a truck to come and bring some of this precious commodity, and we poured yesterday. Except we ran out.
Question: Is it more reasonable to imagine we’ll finish in August (contractor’s current estimate), December (my guess), or some time after next March….
I got some very useful private responses to my plea for help about some basic home network questions . But Doc Searls’s similar plea —admittedly one of more urgency—resulted in personal advice from the Head Lemur.
I know from the email and blog comments I get that I have really smart readers. Many of them are people I’ve met at one time or another, many others are people I hope to meet someday. (By and large they seem more willing to email than to post comments; perhaps shyness comes with wisdom?) Certainly, every time I’ve asked for any sort of tech help here, the responses have been overwhelmingly useful. So I can’t resist asking again.
We are embarked on an ambitious home remodeling project, which includes knocking down half the house and rebuilding it. (I will someday get around to posting dramatic before and after pictures of where half the house used to be.) As part of the project I intend to install a wired home network that would handle a LAN, the telephones, video, and probably the alarm system. I have quite a bit of information about the how-to and nuts and bolts of wiring, e.g. the religious wars between fans of Cat 5e and Cat 6 cables, and anyway I’m hiring a specialist contractor to do the actual crimping and installation. But there are two subjects I feel very under-informed about.
The first set of questions are just about basic home network architecture and hardware: does everything go to a central switch or are there alternative topologies? What sort of equipment do you put at the hub? A router & switch & firewall? A file server? Other things?
The second area of even greater ignorance has to do with video. We don’t currently have a TV set, and aren’t sure when exactly we might get one, but we figure we better wire for cable/satellite while we are at it. Meanwhile, given how big screen prices are tumbling, it is nice to imagine playing DVDs on a nice wide screen somewhere in the house. (And no doubt in the life of the house, people will be shipping tons of video around more routinely than today.) Can a home network be set up to ship video signals from a PC or DVD player (or Tivo-like device!) in one place to a (ethernet-equipped) TV or projection device elsewhere, and if so does this require any special provisions, or do they just have to be at the point of display? If you have cable or satellite, does that signal go to just one place or can it go multiple places simultaneously? If more than one, do the users at each location have to watch the same program or can they watch different ones simultaneously? If you are limited just one location at a time, can you switch which place it is at will, or is it fixed?
Assuming the existence of some future point when I have more energy, I will explain further why our bedroom is now in a different part of the house, and why my desk is in that room too. The story involves architects, a contractor, vast sums of money, permits, the acquisition and filling of a 10×15 climatically controlled storage space, the expectation of permits, an as-yet-undetermined number of real and proposed septic tanks, vast sums of money, the partial destruction of our kitchen, the Sisyphean expectation of the final permits, and of course random and unpredictable delay.
Meanwhile, however, as we appear to have hit a period of delay until the waveform number of future septic tanks collapses to an integer and either produces a permit or a lawsuit, I have cancelled my plans to cancel my plans to go to England for two weeks of Xmas revel with the in-laws. Rather than stay here and grade exams, I will use my ticket. [Much more than you probably want to know about the dangers of buying air tix online in the extended entry.]
I am not the only person I know who abandons Miami when the weather is at its coolest (ie just warm), driest (ie just a little damp) and most perfect in order to go spend a fortnight in the exciting outskirts of Didsbury, a suburb in the outskirts of Manchester, England, which is a somewhat dark and wet and cold and dark and wet and cold place at this time of year. After all, my wife and children do it too. But they are 50 to 100% British, so they may be genetically predisposed to enjoy four daily hours of what is euphemistically called “sunlight”. (Lest I be suspected of Manchester-bashing, it’s a great town, and often very nice in the summer time.)
I intend to keep adding to the blog while in Didsbury, but as my internet access will be POTS rather than broadband, and metered POTS at that, I may have fewer posts, and they are likely to have much more about England and the rest of the UK than is the normal fare here.
Adventures With Orbitz
At one point in the pre-festivities, at a moment when permits seemed belatedly attainable, I attempted to call British Airways to see if I could delay my departure for a few days, with the rest of the family going on ahead of me. I knew it was a cut-rate ticket [Albeit, not cut-rate enough!], from Orbitz, so I expected some penalty. What I got was much weirder. The man from the BA call center said that his computer didn’t show enough about the ticket for him to even tell me if changes were possible. The travel agent had not released sufficient fare details for them to know the conditions. I would have to call the travel agent direct.
OK. I found a phone number for Orbitz. They passed me around to various desks, and eventually I was told that
So I called back BA. No dice. They can’t see the record, and even if they could they wouldn’t look at it. If you buy from a travel agent, they won’t change the outbound under any circumstances, just the return. Policy. No debate. End of story.