What I’ve learned about working remotely:

• Have your own dedicated office space. Working from the couch in your living room where the kids play just isn’t productive. Thankfully I’m not a couch-working type of guy.
• Try to dress the part. While working remotely is stereotyped as working in your boxers, I wouldn’t advise it. When you dress lazy, you tend to work the same way.
• Get a good webcam and decent internet connection. You’ll want to video conference at least once a day to stay in the loop.
• If your main office doesn’t proactively try to support you working remotely, you’ll be the most miserable person in the group. I cannot emphasis this enough. Finding out about new hires, big features and news releases the day of isn’t enjoyable.

Three years ago a friend of mine approached me with a simple question: would I want to help him solve his $55k/year problem? He was paying interchange fees that he’d rather keep, rightfully so. So we spent a few months going over what the ideal solution would be whenever we chatted.

Once we knew the general direction we were going, Ben took charge over the business, legal and PR side, and I was tasked with making a system capable of moving millions, or billions, of dollars in my spare time. At this point in my life, I had a one year old son, was paying wayyyy too much money on a rental house, worked at a job that didn’t pay enough to make ends meet, and had student loan repayments kicking in. Not the most opportune time for a project of this magnitude, but it was a challenge I wanted to take head on.

For the next two years, I would work 8-10 hours at my normal day job and go home. I’d sit down for a quick dinner, and then head downstairs where I’d spend the next 6-8 hours cramming away on this Dwolla project. Somehow I managed to never pass out at my day job (I actually did a pretty good job there as well. Though, looking back, I had lots to learn…) and my wife never divorced me. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she did.

While right in the midst of all of this, I bought a house that had pipes burst two days before closing. We spent the next 6-9 months in a construction zone, where I moved my makeshift office around to wherever was the least dusty.

As far as Dwolla goes, the first year I pretty much spent in proof-of-concept mode. I scrapped several different components along the way and rewrote them after finding a better way to do it. Financial service products were new to me, and I definitely had lots to learn.

One of our more interesting days was when we first moved money from A to B through the network I made. Ben’s response?

Another one was when I first set up sending money to Facebook and Twitter contacts. It was one of those ‘doh’ moments. I recall the first meetup I was able to attend in person, which was when we announced this feature. I sat in the corner of Mars Cafe glued to my laptop monitoring performance of the contact sync service. We ran into some issues earlier that day, so I was terribly nervous that the fixes I had put in place earlier in the day weren’t going to cut it. Thankfully all worked well and I was able to enjoy the rest of the night. It would have been nice to be able to announce the feature myself, but someone had to make sure things didn’t break

I’ve passed the three year mark this summer, which I’ll write about in another post. Hopefully less scatterbrained than this one.

Why?

• We don’t want to raise our kids in the city
• We want to knock out some debt
• Other than needing a new garage, we’ve done pretty much everything we wanted to on this house

The sign is going up this week, most likely. We spent the last weekend in a whirlwind of last minute touch-ups.

This blog likely won’t go anywhere, and the previous posts will show up again eventually.

Back to the grind…

Our house has been used more as a home recently than a place to swing a hammer and wield a crowbar. Maybe it is because we have decided to take it easy? Maybe to sit back and enjoy a cold one? I don’t know. It surely couldn’t be the 8lb baby in the bassinet that has made us rearrange our lives.

We welcomed Adley into the world mid-June. She was 7lb 9.9oz, 20.5in, and came with healthy vocal cords pre-installed. Casey has been doing her best to get Adley into tip-top (as in, “topping the scales”) since she was born. Brendan was a chunky-monkey when born, so we figured Adley may as well follow in his footsteps .

It is amazing how things change when you go from one child to two. You would think the work load would be about double, but I swear it is quadruple what it is with one child. Casey asked me the other night who I thought Adley looked more like. I realized then that I haven’t even had enough time alone with Adley to actually really look her over and figure out important things like that .

We live in a pretty wet area. Wet, as in, almost once a year a river a few blocks away is higher than the road in front of our house. Since our water table is that high, I have to assume every surface of our basement will be moist once a year. Not much, but enough to rot out wood if it were directly against it over time. With this in mind, the entire sub-floor is elevated using a molded plastic material that is sold under the name Platon at our local hardware store. It is dimpled, allowing any moisture to find its way to the drain, as well as away from the surfaces above it. As a bonus, it acts as a vapor barrier. The product comes in a roll that is close to four feet wide with one side having a 4″ strip without dimples to overlap the previous run. The instructions say to seal the two together with the same type of material you’d use to seal a roof. I used house wrap tape as it is easier and I had it already.

My method was to lay down two runs of the Platon before putting the next sub-floor layer down, which I used OSB for. Considering how unlevel our concrete floor is, I should have used tongue and grove plywood to prevent the seams from being uneven. However, after hauling down some twenty 4×8 sheets of 1/2 OSB down our narrow basement stairs, I was using them regardless. Any unlevelness that occurs should be hidden with the carpet.

Here is the majority of the basement subfloor down:

[simage=1,max]

The spot on the right

http://www.meetup.com/dwolla/34577

So if you are in the Des Moines area, or anywhere in the world and really want to meet me, stop by. No one likes free stuff, but we’ll be giving away ridiculously comfy t-shirts if you don’t want to meet me or hear about Dwolla.

You know you want to.

Good excuse to clean the server!

Now, back to our (ir)regular scheduled programming.

Just because I have been putting less time into house projects doesn’t mean that I haven’t been getting anything done on that front. As Casey mentioned in her last post, we are working on flipping the stairs. In the early 1940′s, the owners of our house flipped the stairs around 180 degrees. This allowed them to put a second door in the porch and have an apartment upstairs. But, when the house isn’t used as two separate living areas, it requires you to walk through the main floor bedroom (the “master” bedroom at that) in order to get upstairs. On the plus side, it does encourage us to keep our bedroom mostly clean when company are over.

Getting the stairs flipped is a pretty decent sized project for us. We first ripped out a wall in the old apartment “kitchen” (which was about the size of modern walk-in-closets) and the plaster and lathe on the underside of the stairs in a closet that was added beneath them. This is where the stairs will now start. Then we pulled up the part of the floor that was added above the current stairs to make the room square. After that, I spent a week scraping the linoleum off of the douglas fir.

That is where we are currently. Since the amount of floor in there is pretty small, I ordered a belt sander to hopefully get the floor finished. I’ll need it anyways in a few spots that a large drum sander couldn’t get to anyways. Three weeks from now I have family coming up to do the actual flip.

Other than the stairs, Casey has been working on finishing some of the trim we’ve had on the backburner for months. And we also resealed some of the basement that has had water infiltration issues for a while (which was also likely due to clogged gutters).

We are thinking about moving out of our house and into the country in the next year or two. I grew up in the woods and I want Brendan to be able to enjoy it as much as I did. That is another reason for my disinterest in posting on here. We are at a point now where we aren’t going to start any projects that won’t increase the value significantly (flipping the stairs is likely to be a huge added value to buyers).

Once we figure out what exactly life has in store for us in this, I’ll be sure to do my best to post an update

Seems you can’t open up a single news site without reading about the big upcoming, cinematic release of “New Moon.” I don’t know much about it. It supposedly has vampires in it. And since the young women seem to fawn over it, I’m sure it is jam packed with romance of some sort. What vampire movie is complete without romance?

The wife is a relative new-comer to the series. She started reading it less than a year ago. Although she may be a Twilight-newbie, she is hooked.

Do you know what happens when a wife is counting down the seconds to a new movie, and she wants to go with her husband? The husband goes.

Honey, payback sucks. If they ever come out with another “WarGames,” I’m moving the leash from my neck to yours and dragging you with. Mwuhahaha!

While I’ve waited for the glazing to harden on the last window, I did replace the storm windows in his room. While I like the new aluminum storm windows better than the old aluminum storm windows, I’m not proud of the fact that I gave Menards the wrong measurements and the storms had to be mounted to the exterior rather than up against the normal storm window stops. It doesn’t look bad, but I don’t like to make stupid mistakes like that. And because they were custom sized, they couldn’t be returned, which is why I installed them on the outside trim.

It took me a few days of 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there to prime and paint the window frame that is exposed to the elements. Once I finished that and let it dry, it was time to get the windows in place! We have to create new window stops as the ones that were there consisted of about 3 pieces for each part that should have been a single piece. Lots of seams. So for now, we have windows that more sitting in place than secured in place.

We have two pulls for these windows, but it seems we “misplaced” the screws for them. So for now, you get a shot with my arm in place.

These windows also did not have sash locks. I’m guessing that as the wood rotted, they pulled loose and were thrown. We are going to have to buy a bunch anyways for the rest of the windows in the house. For these windows, I’m pretty certain that I’ll have to dump some wood hardener into the screw holes on the upper sash as that board had quite a bit of moisture damage (it actually sags about 1/8-1/4″ of an inch in the middle, used to be much worse). Speaking of that, any suggestions on how to deal with sash locks that don’t line up equally? Should I buy a jig saw and cut an 1/8″ thick board to match the foot print of the sash lock for the upper sash to get it to the proper height?

Also, on a different note, thank you Todd at Home Construction Improvement for your suggestion on my Office Progress post regarding using a 12″ blade to fix the visible drywall seams. I ended up using a 10″ blade as that was the largest I had, but it worked wonders compared to the 8″ I was using initially.