Yes, I’ve been negligent in my blogging again. This time it’s a combination of being busy and just not being inclined to write an entry. Since my blogging is still a hobby there’s no point in writing if my heart isn’t in it, and when it turns into work I just won’t write.
I actually started writing this entry weeks ago and just now got around to finishing it.
The most significant thing that happened since my last entry is that (nephew) Justin and Caitlin got married last month. They traveled from their home in Virginia and had the wedding ceremony and reception at 317 on Rice Park Event Center in St. Paul.
It was a very nice affair in a wonderful setting with just about the right number of guests. It was an honor to be asked to join Justin and Caitlin in celebrating their special day!
Knowing that I’d want to post something here I took a couple of photos with my cell phone (none of which are any good), but here’s the bride and groom watching while the best man (Jared) gives his speech during the reception.
Image may be NSFW.
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As I’m months away from retirement eligibility now, it’s getting critical that we get our home/new building refinance done as we want to have our financial situation squared away before I retire. Of course with all our screwing around the mortgage interest rates are back on their way up, but the rates are still lower than our current first mortgage rate anyway.
To that end we’ve been trying to work on the house.
The biggest project was putting down flooring. The subfloor had been exposed since we removed most of the carpeting after our dishwasher leaked over two years ago. Then we had the load bearing wall removed, and there were different flooring types in the adjacent rooms (along with a gap in the flooring where the wall had been).
The mortgage underwriter wanted some kind of flooring installed there.
We bought some laminate flooring this winter, but then Kim decided she wanted to use it in a permanent installation somewhere in the house; not temporarily where we needed it now. That, and the subfloor was going to need a large degree of work on it (including floor leveling compound) before we could install laminate flooring.
In the end our debate about which flooring to put down was determined by cost and installation time. Glueless vinyl flooring and carpeting made for the quickest installation times, and both were available for reasonable prices.
Kim bought some remnant vinyl flooring and some cheap indoor/outdoor carpeting for the main area of the house.
In order to replace the flooring, most of the furniture and other stuff had to be moved out of the various parts of the house temporarily. It was a logistics nightmare that took a fair amount of time (as well as lot of grunt-work).
She had help to lay down the carpet in the living room, and they rolled out the vinyl in the other area of the house which I trimmed to size later.
We ended up with some ripples in the vinyl flooring though, and we can’t seem to get rid of all of them. Since it’s supposed to be glueless flooring (it says right on the back of the vinyl to not use adhesive), I don’t know how we’re supposed to fix the ripples…
Image may be NSFW.
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In short order we also discovered that the darker vinyl showed dust more readily (which we have plenty of).
Then I had to move a heat duct that was next to the old sliding glass door that now is the doorway to the four season porch. It’s a project I realized had to be done when we first started thinking about replacing the floor in that area of the house. Once the door was removed, it left the hole for the duct in the floor in middle of the doorway. I had been putting that project off because I assumed it would be a real pain, and unfortunately I was right.
It took most of a day for the project. First I had to cut a hole in the floor for the new duct opening. I located it inside the wall so that the duct could blow air into both the four season and the main part of the house.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I used my oscillating multi-function tool with a saw blade to out the bottom wall plate and the hole in the subfloor, a process complicated by wiring in the wall in that area. While doing that I got a nasty burn on my arm when I inadvertently touched the multifunction tool housing that had gotten hot from use.
Then I had to disassemble the ductwork, and unfortunately the return ductwork had to be disassembled first as it blocked my access to the heating ductwork. I also had to tear out sheet metal work that served as the returns in the living room/kitchen load bearing wall that we had removed last spring. When we removed the wall I patched the holes for the returns there in the subfloor so the ductwork wasn’t serving any purpose after that.
That also reminded me that we don’t have any return ducts in the main part of the house. Hey, that’s another project for me!!
The worst part of the job was relocating the heating duct itself. Removing the old duct wasn’t too bad, but moving all the wiring that runs through the floor joists to be able to relocate the duct, as well as reassembling the ducts I took apart was a long frustrating project.
But eventually I got the job done, and now the four season has better heating and cooling in it.
Once the duct was moved, I had to cut out the section of subfloor with the hole in it and replace that.
The next weekend Kim committed to putting flooring in the four season porch as well. The floor in the four season was just treated deck boards (with gaps in between). We decided we liked the vinyl flooring we had just installed enough to put it in the four season as well.
She moved much of what was in the four season outside, and we had a few days forecast of nice weather to leave it there before it might get rained on. So the four season flooring project was done under the gun.
But since the floor in the four season was deck boards we were going to have to install some sort of underlayment before we could install vinyl flooring.
Kim went to find some another glueless vinyl flooring remnant and I had her buy lauan plywood for underlayment. But after she got home she mentioned that one of the home improvement salespeople mentioned that some manufacturers didn’t approve lauan as underlayment. I did more research and found that the sales person was correct – lauan isn’t really recommended for underlayment use, primarily because it can stain vinyl flooring. A preferred underlayment is underlayment grade plywood.
So the next day I had her buy underlayment grade plywood instead and the following day I spent an afternoon installing it.
Since some of the deck boards were uneven I prepared for the underlayment installation first by cutting out and removing a couple of the boards that didn’t sit flat/flush with the rest of the floor and routed out wood on the back so they’d sit flat. In other places I simply planed off some high spots on the boards. Then I glued and screwed the underlayment plywood to the deck boards, finishing by puttying the screw indentations.
Image may be NSFW.
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The next day I sanded the putty, then laid down the vinyl floor.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The vinyl floor we put in the four season was a lighter shade than the first, and a bit thicker. I don’t know if it was the floor preparation, the thicker floor, or a combination of the two, but the four season floor turned out a lot nicer than the house section. There are no ripples whatsoever in the vinyl in the four season. It looks like a real wood floor and even has wood grain texture.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Kim and I both prefer the lighter shade flooring in the four season, but the darker vinyl flooring in the house was only temporary whereas the four season wasn’t, so we can live with the darker shade in the house for a while.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
On the computer front, I built a new energy efficient PC to act as the weather station processor. It’s based on an Intel i3-2120T processor, which only draws 35 watts of power. Since last summer when my weather PC expired, I had been using Justin’s old Pentium 4 PC, which drew a lot of wattage (and put out a lot of heat).
To compare, the Pentium 4 3Ghz PC (363 Passmark) with 2G memory running Windows XP at idle drew 180 watts of power, whereas my new i3-2120T PC (3002 Passmark) with 8G memory running Windows 7 at idle draws 41-46 watts.
The weather has been quite hot and humid. After an abbreviated spring we transitioned into summer and with it came the mosquitoes. My bug zappers are working overtime and nightly get clogged with mosquito carcasses.
We’ve also had an invasion of green leopard frogs this summer. In the early evening the ground is teeming with them, and as you walk they’re jumping every which way to avoid being trodden upon. I can’t help but think of the movie, “Frogs”.
Hopefully they’re helping with the mosquitoes as well.
I’m not sure why there are so many frogs though – maybe it’s due to the water we got from all the rain and snow we’ve this year.
Speaking of rain, on the morning of July 13th thunderstorms came through the area. When I got out of bed and checked the rain gauge it said we got 5.67 inches of rain, and I naturally assumed it was in error. However, after some checking other rain amount reports nearby online I realized it was accurate after all. All that rain falling within a few hours naturally caused flash flooding in the area; I don’t recall ever having that much rain in one day ever, let alone in a few hours.
A week or so ago we found that our cattle had some sort of eye infection and most of them were rendered temporarily blind by it. Some online research showed it to be Pink Eye. A month and a half ago they were put out into the pasture to the west that we rented again this year. We’ve never had the problem before but all the spring rain resulted in some pretty long grass and that exacerbates the condition. Kim gave them penicillin and they seem to be recovering nicely.
I’ve yet to capture our coyote on the motion detection camera, but there is a lot of activity in the summers near the barn so that’s likely dissuading him from being around as much.
There has been other stuff going on, but I need to wrap this up and publish it or it will never get posted. Hopefully it won’t be as long before the next update.