Tag: home improvement

What’s Next for the Cellar

I am on a late lunch break right now, posting a late lunch break bloggie post. So what, you ask? Well I’m doing it from the cellar, the new location of my home office.

This morning before work I brought my desk and filing cabinet along with both computers (one for work, one for not-work), my gigantic monitor, all of the hardware I use for work (camera, headset mic), and a few other things. Most of it is setup now. I have a podcast playing on my MacBook, airplaying through an old HomePod, and a few lamps with internet connected light bulbs. It’s nice and bright down here and everything is working fine.

There is just one hang up, and it’s one we saw coming a mile away. It’s a little cold down here. Not too bad, but a little chilly. I have a light jacket on. I’m fine and dandy. We have a little space heater upstairs that isn’t being used. I’ll probably bring it down here at some point.

So what’s next for the cellar? Tonight we’re going to mount the new TV in the little living room space. There are a few more things to bring down from upstairs, like the exercise bike and the guitar nook. We have some pictures to hang and some signs and things like that. There’s a shelf we want to put on one wall, and a curtain we want to hang in the one little cellar window. We have a bookcase coming and another little cubbyhole looking storage thingie.

After all of that? Just sit back and relax and watch a movie and have my internal organs hacked up and stapled back together. Yeah, that.

Not Quite Done but SO CLOSE

The last patch of floor is finished!

The baseboard is finished!

The thresholds are finished!

He still needs to replace the outlet and light switch covers and touch up a few little paint issues, but that’s it. We are SO CLOSE!!

We Are SO Close

The contractor got here around 5:00pm. That’s 3-4 hours later than he usually gets here. I don’t know how long he’s staying.

We are so close to being done. The guy has been a freaking rock star. Can he finish tonight? Jen and I are listening to the sounds coming from down there trying to guess what’s still left to do.

We just heard what sounds like a nail gun. Does that mean he’s finishing up the baseboards?

Splash

Remember all of that washing machine talk yesterday? I mentioned there are actually two washing machines. The big guy is the main one, but there is also another one in the pedestal that the big sucker stands on. When we bought the set we thought that was a good idea. In actual fact though, I think I used the pedestal washing machine once over the last two plus years and that was just to make sure it worked.

Last night after Jen fell asleep I went down stairs and washed a pair of jeans and a t-shirt in the pedestal. Again, just to make sure it worked. It did. The water lines into it worked and the outflow hose worked too.

Or so I thought.

When I was hooking everything up yesterday morning there was a little bit of water that spilled out of one of the hoses onto the floor. I kept forgetting to clean it up. This morning I took a little towel down cellar and took care of it. I figured I’d just throw the towel into the big machine and the next time I needed to wash clothes I’d was the towel with the rest of it.

I opened the side loading washing machine door and about a gallon of water sloshed out.

WhatWhatWhat?

The drum was full of water. How? It was empty when I took the last load of laundry out yesterday. Why was it full now?

Apparently the pedestal washer’s outflow somehow either drained into the big machine, or it drained out, went past the splitter on the out flow hose, and then backwashed into the big machine. Is that even possible? It must be.

I mopped up the new spill with a couple more towels and ran the unit in 15 minute quick wash mode. Everything drained appropriately.

The moral of the story is: Buying the pedestal thing was clearly a mistake and it will never be used again.

Wiped Out

We did so much stuff around the house this weekend. I need a weekend to recover from the weekend.

We’re pretty optimistic that the contractor will be done in the cellar today or tomorrow. After that we need to put all the furniture back where it belongs. I had to move everything away from the walls last night so that he can finish the baseboards. Once everything’s back where it’s going we’ll mount the new television on the wall and then… maybe watch a movie or something?

Then I need to move my office space downstairs too. There’s an exercise bike that needs to move too. Oh yeah, I forgot that we got a nice sound system for the new TV. That needs to go in before our first movie date.

Then what? We got a couple of foldable room divider things. One will go between the living room and the work space and the other will wall off the laundry room. The last thing, I think, is to figure out where the new music nook will go. It has to be close enough to the office so that I can use my computer for more wonderful home recording demo amazingness. I haven’t recorded a song in two months. That needs to change.

After all of that?

Oh, just surgery.