Monday, February 29, 2016

Attack of the killer ants!

OK, maybe not killer ants but they were big! While cleaning up in the utility room we spotted a few carpenter ants and with further inspection, we found a few more. This isn’t the first time (or even the second time) that we’ve found carpenter ants so we’re somewhat prepared for them. The first time was right at the start of this project when we opened up the wall around around the tub. The tub surround had been leaking for years and the ants loved it. The second time was when we opened up the wall upstairs above the bathroom. It looked like the old window there had been leaking a bit and thus, some of the survivors from below had found a new home. The latest incident has them in the same general area between the two floors but next to the bathroom. Looks like the caulking on the flashing on the roof of the utility room had failed and possibly some water was getting in there. It’s been freshly caulked and the ants have been sprayed so we expect to find a pile of dead ants when we get back up there. We cut out some of the utility room ceiling to get a better look at what was happening and found that the insulation up there has pretty much turned to dust. So we’ll be pulling the entire ceiling along with the walls when we start working on that room.

Another interesting note, the ceiling joist for the utility room are real 2×8’s, not dimensional 2×8 that are really 1 1/2” x 7 1/2”, but rough cut 2” x 8” boards. They had to cut them down on the ends to fit in the joist hangers.

When we weren’t battling ants, we were working on the upstairs. We finished up installing flooring in the area under eaves behind the kneewalls. It looks more finished, even without the kneewalls built. We also installed a lot of window and door casing. All the casings are installed now. But there still some filling, painting and calking to get them looking nice. The non-flat walls made it challenging to get the casing to lay flat to the door/window frames. But when it’s all done and painted it should look pretty good. Many of the doors are too close to walls so that a full piece of casing is too wide. In fact, I think there were only 6 out of 14 that didn’t need to be trimmed. Some of the walls were so far out that we needed to cut some of the drywall out of the way to make the casing lay flat.

When I can summarize the work we did over the weekend in a couple of sentences, it seems like we didn’t get much done. It’s hard to convey how much work is involved sometimes. When dealing with this finish type work, I don’t trust that I can get things cut to the right size in one go, so I almost always cut big, take the piece to the location where it will go, mark, cut again, check and sometimes there’s a third or fourth cut before it’s right.

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Happy Valentines Day Mr. Presidents

Valentines Day and a 3 day weekend for President’s day, what could me more romantic than spending it at the cabin raking leaves, painting and installing flooring? We did take a break to have a nice prime rib dinner at the local eatery so it wasn’t all work.

We’re now in a phase of the project where we’re doing a lot of detail work. It all needs to be done and it does provide the finishing touch that makes everything look right. But it feels like we spend a lot time for not a lot of accomplishments. It’s not a room changing event like texture or paint.

The weekend started with finishing up the bull-nose on the stairs. It was just cutting and gluing down 7 or 8 pieces, but now the stairs are done. And they look pretty good. Then we moved on to painting cases and installing baseboards. The living area baseboards have been stacked (creating a tripping hazard) for a few months now. We were waiting for the right time to work on them. Since we’re starting with 16ft. long boards it made the most sense to have the miter saw right outside the front door, but we want to be working in the rain (or cold). The weather was perfect so we moved the furniture out of the way, cut and installed the baseboards in the living area and the final piece in the kitchen. With the kitchen floor a bit higher than the living area floor (1/4” or so), the baseboard in the kitchen needed to be cut down to match. The living area and kitchen now look almost finished! All that’s left is a bit of caulking.

We started painting the door/window casing upstairs, but that then limits what else we can do up there since the casing is laying on the saw stand and we don’t want generate sawdust while the paint is drying. Well, with good weather outside… We built a couple of sawhorses from the old deck/ramp wood and moved the painting outside. This allowed work to progress up in the bedrooms. The front bedroom window inside casing was installed (and measured for blinds). A couple of pieces of door casing were installed. Most of the door casings will need to have the width trimmed down so that’s a job for the next visit. Laminate was installed for the kneewall floors in the front bedroom. We have the laminate and since a lot of the area behind the kneewalls will be used for storage, using the laminate there will make it easier to move stuff around and easier to keep clean. Plus, it looks way better. We worked on preping the back bedroom kneewall area by adding a bit more subfloor and cutting out the unused vent pipe.

Genny got the bathroom door painted and that’s back up so all the doors upstairs are ready for hardware. Speaking of the upstairs bath, we installed the niche.

And since it was so nice outside, we spent a few hours racking leaves/pine needles. The area around the cabin is clear and we’re creating a nice large pile that will need to be hauled off to the burn pile.

Monday, February 8, 2016

Stairway to … well, the upstairs

We finished up our last trip the cabin by cutting a couple of the laminate boards for the stairway. Finishing up the stairway was the goal for this trip.

Both the rise and tread are too wide for a single laminate board so each is composed of two laminate boards. The process for each rise and tread goes like this:

  1. Cut two laminate boards to appx. 31 inches long (cutting off both ends so they’re square) on the miter saw upstairs
  2. Glue the two board together to form one 31” x 11” board
  3. Measure and rip the board down to proper width for the step (rise or tread) on the table saw in the back room
  4. Set the angle for one side of the step using a sliding T-bevel gauge
  5. Use the T-bevel to set the miter saw to the same angle and cut one side of the board
  6. Set the angle for the other side of the step using the T-bevel and measure the width of the step
  7. Use the T-bevel to set the miter saw to the same angle again and cut the other side of the board slightly over-sized
  8. Test fit
  9. Trim a small amount from the board until it fits
  10. Check the board depth and possibly rip it on the table saw to get it sized correctly
  11. Glue the board to the step
  12. Pin nail the board to hold it in place

That process takes at least 30 minutes and is needed for every single rise and every single tread. There were only a couple of steps where the angle was 90°, the rest were just a bit off up to about 2°. The one thing when doing stairs like this is that you don’t want gaps between the laminate and the sides, it just looks bad.

I did get a bit faster towards the end, but most of that was because I rough cut and glued up a bunch of boards Saturday night so that I didn’t have to do that on Sunday.

There’s still a bit of work left as not all the steps have the bullnose trim installed. We just ran out of time. But finished stairs look soooo much nicer than unfinished.

Genny spent a bunch of time outside checking over the yard and cleaning things up. She swept off the entire deck, which was covered in pine needles.

We took up the upstairs bathroom niche and it fits perfect. Genny painted it with a couple of coats of paint and started painting the inside window casing parts for the front bedroom window. We put the rest of the painting on hold as there was just too much sawdust while working on the stairs.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Home Automation

Some questions from a colleague about home automation got me thinking. Maybe I should document what I use and why. Well, this entry is an attempt to do so. First some background.

When Smarthome first introduced the Insteon line of devices and protocol they made it fairly easy for developers by providing full documentation and development kit. The price point was less than the equivalent Z-Wave and UPB products but more than similar X10 products. However, it also would work with X10 products. I had some X10 products (dimmer switches, lamp/appliance modules). Since I preferred to have a Linux based control system, getting started with the Insteon SDK seemed like the way to go. I jumped in with the development kit (PLC & lamp module) plus a few additional switches and lamp modules. Using the documentation, I started writing Insteon tools for Linux. I developed a fairly robust set of tools to control devices, dump link tables, save and compare topology. Then Smarthome changed the protocol. The differences were substantial and you had to support both.

It was about this time that a company called Universal Devices Inc. came out with the ISY26. The ISY26 was an embedded controller for Insteon. Since they were dealing with all the special cases needed to interact with all the different devices and both protocols and provided a nice network based API to interact with the ISY26, it seemed like a good way to go. I jumped on-board. About this time I was also looking into ways to get touch screen controllers in the house. I started playing with Cinemar’s MainLobby home automation software. This software is Windows based, but allowed for custom plug-in’s to support various HA type devices using Visual Basic or C#. I wrote a couple of simple things to get familiar with it and then developed a plug-in to interact with the ISY26. Because of this, UDI approached me about developing something similar for HomeSeer, another home automation software company. A lot of what I created for MainLobby was applicable for HomeSeer so I decided to go for it. It took about a year to fully develop a plug-in for HomeSeer, but I was able to create a core library that interacts with the ISY and front-end code for both MainLobby and HomeSeer that made use of it. The HomeSeer plug-in is available in the HomeSeer store. Attempts to get Cinemar to officially recognize my MainLobby plug-in failed. When a new player in the home automation software field emerged, Code Core Technologies Elve, I switched over to that for my home control system. Developing touch screen interfaces was easy and they fully supported third party developers creating additional drivers. Using the same base code that was used for the MainLobby and HomeSeer plug-ins, I quickly created an ISY driver for Elve. I’ve also created and modified a number of other drivers for Elve. Being able to customize it for my environment was a huge selling point. Unfortunately, Code Core Technologies was unable to survive and has mostly shutdown. The good news is that the latest version of Elve is still available as a free download. I’m currently working on a driver for the RainMachine irrigation controllers.

My current system is:

A UDI ISY 994i controller with Z-Wave module
Elve 2.2 running on a Windows XP virtual machine
Insteon light switches throughout the house
Insteon keypad switches
Insteon lamp modules for various stand alone lamps
Insteon LED light bulbs for a couple lamps
Insteon motion sensors for garage, side door light, and den light
Insteon garage door sensor/control module
Insteon Venstar thermostat
One Z-wave dimmer switch
Two Z-wave lamp modules with beaming support
Kwikset Z-Wave deadbolt
DSC alarm panel
Russound CAV whole house audio controller
Roku 2 media streamer
ASUS All-in-one PC touchscreen computer for monitoring & contol