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:
[code lang="csharp"]this.SettingsLoaded += new System.Configuration.SettingsLoadedEventHandler(Settings_SettingsLoaded);[/code]
Then you can set up the event handler in a similar manner:
[code lang="csharp"]///
/// 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";
}
}[/code]

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.

We’ve waited a long time for this. More than four months coming. Our kitchen is finally starting to look like one. While we are still a couple weeks away from actually using it, it sure feels good to see cabinets going up.

And with our appliances put in front of their respective locations:

Later this week, there is (yet another) contractor coming over to do some work we weren’t sure was going to be done or not. He is going to be doing some patching and replacing of maple flooring on the main floor. There are a couple spots where someone had put outlets mounted on the floor. While the one that is an inch away from the wall wasn’t that bad, the one that was right in the middle of the floor had been driving us crazy. So those two spots are going to go away. Then there is another location that had a cold air return in the past, and it was “patched” up by just placing 4 maple floor boards in the rectangular opening. While the floor is a good match, it isn’t blended at all, so it sticks out like a sore thumb. That’ll be fixed.

One of the worst flooring areas is where there used to be room dividers between the living room and dining room (ugh at whoever tore those out!). This area was patched in quite poorly with cut marks into neighboring floor boards. And after the burst pipes, they became quite bouncy and loose. I’m excited to see how this is going to turn out.

Onto the main floor bedroom, there is another cold air return that was patched again. This time with one solid board (at least 6″ wide by at least 2′ long). If the other one sticks out like a sore thumb, this sticks out like a monster truck at a Mini Cooper convention.  As Brendan would say: buh-bye. The other spots in this room aren’t quite as bad. There are a couple <1″ holes drilled in near the trim that will go. And in the middle of the room, there must have been a bad squeak, as someone put in around two dozen bright, wide, silver nails into the floor boards. This area will be cut out and patched.

Seriously, what are the odds? We buy a house 4 months ago. Two days before moving in, we get burst pipes. NOW, hours after getting a fully functional upstairs bathroom, the dike over by the old Lincoln Drive neighborhood broke loose!! We had to leave the house a couple hours ago due to the water making its way up our street. From what the radio is saying, our neighborhood has a few feet of water in it.

I think we are going to give up the dream of ever owning a home.

Here is a picture that the paper in town here has on its website:

Our house is about 10 blocks to the left of this picture. We’ll keep you up to date.  Sounds like FEMA will be bringing in trailers for people whose houses are under water to live in.

Happy April Fool’s Day!

We officially have a working bathroom upstairs. No longer do we have to trudge down two flights of stairs for that middle of the night bladder call. No longer do we have to drag Brendan down to the cold basement to take a bath.

Here is our finished Douglas fir bathroom floor:

And with the essentials mostly in place:

Sorry about the 3 different shades of yellow on the walls. Every picture was about 10 times too dark so I had to brighten them all up and it resulted in the walls looking like they were repainted between each photo.

Now all we need is the window trim to be put into place, the bottom trim to be put into place, the outlet covers installed, and some sort of medicine cabinet/mirror installed. After that it is just decorating.

All I care about is having a functioning bathroom within reasonable walking distance from the bedroom!