Things have been busy around here this summer. If you follow this blog at all, you’ve likely noticed due to the almost non-existent posting. It is just hard to put together a blog post when you’ve either got sunny, 80* weather outside, or a project here or there calling your name.

Another one of the reasons I have been so busy is I’m making a pretty big (and positive) change in my life. I’m stuck keeping it quiet for a bit longer as some key people are not aware of the change and they probably wouldn’t be pleased to find out via this blog. I’ll spill the beans in the next week or two.

But onto the work we’ve been doing recently. The basement bedroom/office is slowly coming together. All of the exterior walls are framed and wired up. Yesterday, the last key component was completed. Foam insulation:

This was done by the same company (Cullen Insulation) that did the basement bathroom. I absolutely love this stuff. My wallet, not so much. But it is the only feasible way to seal up the concrete and it quickly adds R7 per inch. I’ll be adding R11 fiberglass insulation over the top of this (my wallet really wouldn’t like 3 1/2 inches consider how it disliked the 1 inch). Ideally this would result in R18, but since the foam took up a bit of the room in the stud cavity, the fiberglass will get compressed a little bit and will likely lose a bit of its insulation capabilities. It’ll be more than enough for a basement though!

We also stopped by Menards last night to pick up some materials needed to continue on. We picked up some plastic for a vapor barrier and the necessary staple gun. We also grabbed another 250ft of 12/2 wiring. It is amazing how fast you can run through 250ft of wire! I also picked up more 2×4′s to frame in the area around the furnace. Did you know you can fit 20 7ft 2×4′s in a 4 door Grand Am, as well as a two year old and a wife (with the trunk closed)? It takes impressive skill, though .

It is amazing how warm weather seems to make the to-do list grow exponentially. I don’t even want to know how long it has been since I have written a post last. If I could find some great excuse as to why I haven’t posted an update recently, it would have been placed here. Maybe something like: “I thought of writing a post on my trip into outer space to save planet Earth from an incoming meteor, but time was of the essence.” Instead, all I can say is I’ve been busy, and the longer it was between posts, the more guilty I felt about not posting, which seemed to make posting even more difficult.

But anyways… the post, Shane. Focus. The most up to date, update, I can give you is on our fence. I came home for lunch today to find a friend of the neighbors out pressure washing their side of our fence. The aforementioned fence isn’t anything award winning, to say the least. It is a previous owner’s DIY job. Basic 1×10′s run horizontal, attached to 4×4′s every 8 or so feet.

It used to be your standard ~6ft tall, but at some point it seems one of the previous owners and the neighbor got along so great they chopped it down to 3-4ft and added a gate between the two yards. When we first bought the place, we were planning on raising it back up. Potentially replacing it altogether in the process. But we’ve gotten to the point now where we rather enjoy mingling with the neighbors over the fence. And they have a couple black lab puppies that are fun to play with:

Abby

Bella

Back to the neighbor’s friend pressure washing the fence… after finishing my lunch, we went out and asked them what they were up to. Their side of the fence is in pretty rough shape. Some of it has never seen paint, and the rest appears to have just been primed. They were finally going to paint it. After looking at it for a bit, we mutually agreed that it needs a bit more work than that. We pointed a couple dozen boards that needed to be replaced. Some were sistered where parts must have rotted out. While replacing them would probably have been easier and not that expensive, I can appreciate the macgyver spirit. Others were badly warped, and others rotting. They seemed on board (hah, no pun was intended, but it works!) with the suggestions, but they might be cursing me now that I’m back at work.

Neighbor's Side

As I mentioned in our last post, we won a rug from Liz over at A Constructed Life in conjunction with CSN Rugs. We received the rug just a few days later. With this gorgeous weather we’ve been enjoying, our posting has almost been non-existent. We’ve got a few things to catch up on, but for now, I leave you pictures of a rug we won that looks like it was meant to be in our house:

Brendan approves:

Like I said, it was meant for our house! I couldn’t have picked out a better color, size, or style myself.

Thanks again Liz! If I can ever get back into posting regularly, we’ll have to do our own little giveaway.

I’m not used to winning many things in life. Once in high school, I talked a friend of mine who worked at a gas station into giving me the code to get a free car wash. After getting my ’91 Chevy all shined up, I went back inside and bought a lotto ticket. Scratched it off, and sure enough, I won $5. So I gave it to him as a “thank-you.” Technically, I should have given it to the owners for stealing a car wash, but what can you expect from a 16 year old?

Anyways, on Monday, Liz over at A Constructed Life in conjunction with csnrugs held a contest for a free rug. Normally I don’t enter these, but I decided to live life on the wild side and put in a comment for the rug. Sipping my Sobe this morning, checking out a few of the blogs I normally visit, I saw that we won the rug! I’ve been a little out of it this morning and had to re-read it to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind.  I might read it again later to make sure, but as of now, it looks like we won. Wahoo!

Thanks Liz and csnrugs!

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I’ve been looking for a clean solution to having a dynamic connection string for a LINQ to SQL data context. My primary desire for this is developing/debugging an application on a test database. Sure, you can always go change your connection string in the app.config file, but I tend to forget to revert it back before deployment.

After doing a bit of research today, I realized that if you open up the project’s property pages, click on the settings tab, and then click on ‘View Code’ on the top, you’ll access the “base” partial Settings class. In the constructor, add an event handler for the SettingsLoaded event handler:

this.SettingsLoaded += new System.Configuration.SettingsLoadedEventHandler(Settings_SettingsLoaded);

Then you can set up the event handler in a similar manner:

///
/// Dynamically update settings for development when a debugger is attached
///
void Settings_SettingsLoaded(object sender, System.Configuration.SettingsLoadedEventArgs e)
{
    if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
    {
        // Adjust the connection string as you see fit
        this["yourConnectionStringName"] = "Data Source=yourDevHost;Initial Catalog=yourDevDatabase;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=yourDevUser;Password=yourDevPassword";
    }
}

We are finally getting to the home stretch in the burst pipe restoration work. Our main contractor moved all of his tools out of our kitchen for the first time in almost 5 months. We have a 100% functional kitchen to use now. You have no idea how good it feels to say that.

We haven’t started the “decorating” phase in the kitchen yet, but here are some non-cluttered pictures of our kitchen:

Things to note in the pictures:

• The ceiling is a tile wallpaper that was painted with a (much too expensive) copper looking paint
• The refrigerator door opens too close to the wall. We’d do that different if we could
• The upper cabinet to the left of the fridge is awkward as it has a shelf thing on the door. Hard to get to stuff in there. We’d do that different if we could.
• You can’t see it, but our appliances need a good buffing

I also installed a vanity sink top and faucet in the basement bathroom. We don’t post a lot about this room as it doesn’t have any historical character. It has a fiberglass tub/shower, a new toilet, washer and dryer, and a new sink. Eventually we’ll make it a bit more charming, but for now, it is function over form.

Things to note in the pictures:

• The pine trim will be painted white (gotta do whatever you can to make it feel as bright a possible in the basement!)
• The door needs to be stripped and repainted

Also, my office is finally getting put together!

Ignore my fancy desk chair. I know you are all jealous. It is mine, all mine. Ignore the mess on the desk as well, I haven’t quite gotten to the organization part of assembling the room yet.

In the office, we’ll be stripping all the trim eventually. For now, we are going to take a breather from stripping wood. I haven’t made a post about it, but we’ve stripped I swear close to a mile of trim in the past two weeks. We are sick of stripping wood.

Also, one of the benefits of moving our furniture to the main floor is our basement is slowly becoming more manageable:

Still a disaster area, but not nearly as bad. Once we FINALLY close on our loan Friday (yes, it has been almost 5 months since we were supposed to close!), we’ll probably start tackling this mess.

As you can tell, this post is making for lots of lost time! So to continue jumping around, I’m going to show you our new and old baseboard trim. In our upstairs bathroom, and downstairs kitchen, the original baseboard was long gone and we didn’t want to put the cheap stuff back in. So we had ordered some douglas fir and our contractor cut it to the almost identical profile as the original stuff.

New trim:

Old trim:

Ignore the dust. We have given up on keeping the dust away until the contractors are gone. As you can tell, the old baseboard trim is much tighter grained. It also has a coat of polyurethane on it, which the new stuff hasn’t received yet. These are also both stained different colors. The old trim picture is actually a non-original color. We tried to match the old trim with the original color.

Speaking of the dust, we also had our air ducts cleaned yesterday. I’m glad we didn’t dust prior to that as it put a layer of fine dust on top of *everything*. The guy came here around 2PM with their fancy air duct cleaning trailer. He didn’t leave until 6:30PM. Around 6, I asked him how many houses had ducts as bad as ours. He said he never saw one as bad. He had to unclog their machine 5 times. He showed me what was clogging it up. It was literally a 3″ thick layer of pure dust. Yum.

It has been a bit overdue, but I am excited none-the-less. Our floors are ALL DONE. Every last bit of them. No more flooring contractors over here anymore.

Since I have been bad with posting pictures recently, hopefully this one will make up for it.

Our living room:

Dining room:

Close-up:

Hallway to the main floor bedroom:

Main floor bedroom:

Quality test – PASSED:

We have to wait until Monday to move stuff in to allow it to fully “cure.” So, after 5 months of living upstairs, Monday is our “move-in” day. If I didn’t owe a good chunk of hours to my employer, I’d love to have taken the day off. For now, we are going to have to settle for cleaning all the dust off of the wood work and windows.

Some time today, our main contractor is supposed to be coming over to install the main kitchen counter top. That will allow the plumber and electrician to show up on Monday and get the kitchen finished. I should say that is the ideal scenario. I emailed the second tier “general contractor” to set up the plumber and electrician and haven’t heard from him yet. I’ll assume they’ll just show up sometime early next week.

What’s left?

1. Kitchen counters (today the main piece is installed, early next week the island and sliver between the stove and fridge is installed)
2. Sink, dishwasher, stove, and refrigerator hookup
3. Baseboard trim in the kitchen
4. Cabinet crown
5. Kitchen ceiling paint
6. Baseboard trim re-installation in the dining room by the door to the kitchen
7. Dining room door to the kitchen trim
8. Baseboard trim in the main floor bedroom on the wall opposite the kitchen (where we took out the added door)
9. Main floor lights installation
10. Upstairs hallway trim installation
11. Upstairs bathroom trim installation
12. Upstairs bathroom cabinet installation
13. Duct cleaning

All-in-all, not too huge of a list. Most of the items are pretty simple. 80-90% of it should be done this coming week. I probably missed a few things, but if I did, they probably aren’t more than a 5 minute job.

We’re getting there!

Winter just doesn’t want to let go of North Dakota. We enjoyed near 60 degree weather on Saturday. A trip to the park for the little guy to go down every last slide, as well as breaking out the grill and making some steaks, cheesy potatoes, and corn on the cob.

Sunday, it rained. It was cold. It snowed.  Yes, those white flakes that fall from the sky fell once again. When I started to see them fall, I decided to go to sleep early in hopes it would all be gone by the time I woke up, making it appear to just be a bad nightmare. It almost worked. My car had a little bit left on the rear window.

In a way, I was greatful for the change from rain to snow. While it was raining consistently, I started hearing a water drop every couple of seconds. This house just loves water incase you haven’t noticed yet. The leak I had hoped to have fixed a month or so ago in the roof isn’t fixed. I have no idea where it is coming from. So when the rain turned to snow, the leak stopped. Tonight I’ll be climbing back on the roof with more roof caulk stuff in hopes to find the issue and put it to rest. This time I hopefully won’t drop the tube of roof caulk stuff off of the roof. Yes, I dropped the roof caulk stuff off of the roof the last time. Rookie.

You remember the flooring contractor who was supposed to be here almost two weeks ago? Fired.

Round two starts tonight with a new contractor looking at it at 5pm. If this guy can keep his word, which I find half of these guys can’t do, he will be here Thursday to patch the floors if we give him the go ahead.

That is all I have. Just enough for three sentences and not even a single picture.

Hope you all are having a great Monday!

We’re burnt out. We are ready to use the upstairs to sleep, the main floor to play. We are ready to eat at a normal table, rather than one of us standing, the other sitting on a stool. We are ready to take our dirty dishes, and place them into a mechanical device that spits them out clean. We are ready to watch a movie on the TV, rather than a computer monitor. We are ready to sit on a couch to relax, rather than the floor.

We are ready to be done.

Counter tops are still not in. They better be in next week.

The contractor that was supposed to patch the floor starting Wednesday or yesterday is still not here. If he doesn’t show up on Monday he is getting fired.

The wood for our trim is finally here, but has yet to be cut, yet alone installed.

Our nice contractor is still nice, but hasn’t been showing up nearly as frequently as he used to. This is slowing us down tremendously. So much so that I took one of the side jobs I was going to give him into my own hands. That window we removed from the kitchen left an area on the exterior of the house without siding. I stopped by the lumber yard on my birthday a few days ago and picked up the cedar lap siding. Two days ago I put some tar paper over the plywood that covered the old window location and sealed it up. From there, I put up about half of the siding. I called it a night as to not keep the neighbors up with my pounding.

Getting the siding to look decent has turned out to be a significant challenge. The new lap siding is 1/16″ to 1/8″ thinner than the old stuff (and much less dense). This resulted in the first board sitting in too deep. From that one, I’ve been placing a nail under it when nailing it in to keep it at the same distance as the old material. This will require significant caulking under the lip of the board to seal them.

Overall, the siding project hasn’t turned out as well as I’d like so I’m going to save taking pictures until it is painted as I think it’ll not look as bad once the boards are at least the same color.

Tonight I’m going to finish the siding, find a camping chair from the garage porch, and enjoy a nice drink in the most comfortable chair we have access to at the moment. It’ll be good.