Thursday, April 27, 2006

!!!?????

Uh.... wow.

I'm speechless.

Just... wow.

look here for amazing amounts if ignorance

I'm not sure if they are serious or not...! I hope not. No, there's no way that can be serious. At least the author didn't write it seriously. I'm sure some people will take it seriously though. The author of that blog, shelley, seems to have taken it seriously. =)

Basement framing started tuesday morning. It's almost complete. I'll post pictures soon!

Sunday, April 23, 2006

"The Basement" or "My longest post ever". You decide.

So. Soon most of my free time while the kids are awake will be spent working on the basement. As I mentioned in my last post, by the end of next week the framing will be complete. Or at least what I've hired out will be done, there's no telling if we will make modifications to that after the fact. heh.

I mentioned pictures, so I thought I'd do a sort of virtual tour. Let's head downstairs through this door.



Watch your step. You'll have to excuse the laundry down at the bottom that is 100% my fault and reflects in no way upon my wife. Really, I should be ashamed of myself.



That wall to the left with the handrail will be punched out. We will be putting a banister down the side and have it open up into the family room. I'm not sure yet if we're going to do railing on a slope or the stairstep method where the rails meet the stairs, we'll see. My wife probably has an opinion on that but since I'm doing in I'll probably get to choose. =) I've been assured that it's a doable project by yourself and I'll have to trust that. If not I'm in trouble!




This is the room to the right at the bottom of the stairs. You can see that there is a little 3 foot landing or what have you on the stairs into this room (on the left). That stuff there is garbage to be hauled out. It should be a nice room with 2 windows. This will most likely turn into a guest room. I also wouldn't be surprised if my 2 arcade machines went in here, but that's yet to be determined. They may live in the family room. It's around 13x10 feet not including the closet, which will go up against the stairs, so not a small room.



This is the storage area, you can see the edge of the table there in the previous picture -- it's going to be behind the guest room. As you can see, we have at least half of it full already. Most of that stuff was spread around the basement previous to this. And I'd like to point out that those blue crates (about 8) have little girl's clothes in them. One has only shoes in it. And that's just the crates, there are a couple other boxes. Almost half of our storage is kids clothes. That scares me. =)



Just to the right of the storage area will be the bathroom. It sits flush (har har) with the laundry room. It will likely mirror our upstairs bathroom, having a tub/shower combo against the wall, a toilet and then a sink. You can see where the drain is for the toilet there sticking up. I think we need to punch a hole in the cement for the tub drain, hopefully they have something in place under where it's marked. We want to put cupboards or shelves or something in the corner near the laundryroom door as well, but we'll see how that goes. The bathroom will likely take priority over the guest room as far as spending goes so it's more likely to get done first. And lucky for me my cousin is a plumber, so I should be able to get a good deal and some professional help with that.



Moving on, this is the hallway that will connect the laundry room, storage, bathroom and the guest room with the family room (right side on the end) and future bedroom (left at the end). Under the stairs will be storage as well as all my ethernet cables and router among other things.



Under the stairs. Yahoo! Not much to say here, I almost didn't post this. =)



This is the laundry room. Not much will change here other than having a door installed so you can't see all of the dirty clothes. You know, hallway aesthetics and all.



This is the future bedroom. We'll be leaving this unfinished for a few reasons. Money being one, we don't really need it finished, and the biggest reason is that when it rains a lot at once the window to the east leaks. That's another project for another day.




This is the future family room. You can see the staircase where the banister will go and where the wall will be removed. This could have been made into two bedrooms and the guest room/storage area made into a family room, but we liked this layout better. More light in the family room and a little more space. The doorway from the hall that you see will have an archway to help keep things more open. That's also why the hall needs to be finished with the family room -- it would look crappy having it open up into unfinished basement. Not that I care so much but I know my wife wants things to look nice and I can't really argue much with that. Other than financially. heh.



Last picture... This is the wall that we're knocking out. The 4th stud from the right is where the opening will start. It should look very nice while still giving us some wall space. I'm hoping to but the bookshelf on the right under the stars and get it out of the upstairs bedroom. There has been some discussion about a landing that sticks out at the bottom, but I'm not certain what will happen at this point there.

I better quit, I've been staving off my eldest for almost an hour doing this post. I think we'll go make some pizza dough and have pizza for dinner. I am really loving having 2 Sundays in a row more or less off for church stuff!

Have a good week. Until next post.

Friday, April 21, 2006

Yay it's friday... again?

Time flies.

I had a great weekend last week. Very little actual responsibility and lots of freedom from stress.

The beginning of the work week was full board back to the grind, but things are easing up. I've gotten a few other people involved and that's helped let up the stress a bit.

In other news we've decided to have a friend of ours come in and frame the basement for us. He's giving us a really good deal from what I know, materials plus $0.80 per square foot for labor. We're not going with the metal studs due to cost but I'm feeling pretty OK about the whole deal. it'll be around $1250-1300 when it's all said and done which for most of a basement framed really isn't bad. Oh, and it'll be done by the end of next week assuming all goes well. Wohoo! Then I'll get to play with the wiring and duct work.

We will be finishing cleaning this weekend to prepare for the start of construction. I'l see if I can snap some photos and put them up here this weekend. I'm sure my wife would much rather have it clean before I post photos. =)

Oh, and I sprayed for weeds in the front yard this week. Just about everyone I know will be doing yard work this weekend. Time to borrow the tiller from my parents to till the garden again.

I also need to put a note in here to say that my wife is the best! She's been really supportive through all of my work headaches and has really let me work at my own pace to keep things going sanity-wise. I couldn't do it without her.

Pictures later. Until then.

Friday, April 14, 2006

Yay!

It's friday.

It's the friday before a holiday. A holiday in which I won't have church meetings other than the stock standard stuff that normal people go to.

A holiday which begins for the money customer TODAY, it being good friday.

Work was wonderfully peaceful.

Oh, and did I mention I got a raise today? Yes, it's been a good friday.

In other news there was a big discussion in the office today about food and drink. I thought this video was a good sum up and pretty entertaining. =)

Happy Easter!

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Work sucks

Customers with a lot of money that want the impossible

+

A boss who likes money

=

I am asked to do the impossible.

Well, improbable at best. Transfer 55 phone books worth of data flawlessly in a weekend with no support in our software to do this. Yeah, there are going to be some problems. They knew this and agreed to it. Now that there are probvlems guess what? They don't want to deal with them.

At least I won't have to worry about this after a month or so, the big big nasties will be done then.

I apologize to all 1-2 of you who check my blog with any regularity. I hope to get back to posting, I have 3 posts rattling around in my head that I'd like to make.

I hope everyone else is enjoying the turn in weather lately, I don't seem to be. =)

Wah wah wah, I'm so picked on. heh.

until later.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Post?

So I have this post that is rattling around in my head. I'm going to type it all out. Really. I just need the time to do it.

Now isn't the time.

This evening I got home for the 2nd time around 10:30 PM. My wife and I watched the first episode of Law & Order season 3 at this time, as the baby is up and grumpy. (another time I'll go into this -- we have watched the first 2 seasons of Law & Order together, starting the 3rd now.) I lay down to go to sleep around 11:30. five minutes later I'm on my laptop scrambling to get into a computer at work to do the job I left "until later" tonight. Oh, and I need to be done by midnight, before the auto-backup happens for the customer's database.

I think I may have had 30 seconds or so of room to spare on that one. heh.

There was one other thing I needed to do as well, but I'm zipping some files up so that they transfer faster over the internet to a customer up in Canada. Really, gigabytes of data shouldn't be sent over a 150k DSL connection. :/ I had about 15 minutes to spare while the archiving happened, so you get an update.

Lucky you!

I have more interesting stuff coming really. But for now we wait.

If you're bored have a look at timbuktu software. It's amazing stuff, saved me a number of times working off-site.

I'll probably have more friday or saturday. Tomorrow if things go really well. I promise not to be as boring as dirt sometime soon. Really.

Until then.

Monday, April 03, 2006

Decision: No

Well, looks like now is not the right time for one of those machines.

I'd love to go into details as to why I decided against it or some big story about why I couldn't get it after some big ordeal.

I never got an email back from the guy selling the machines.

So, decision is made for me. I keep looking.

Oh, and on the basement, I am waffling on doing the framing myself or getting someone to do it. I'm cheap so I want a low price, but I really don't want to do it all by myself. heh.

I have more to say but I'll say it later.