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My hands are raw…

Well the Christmas break was full of all the usual family visits, making sure we saw as much of our two clans as possible, in the little bit of time we had. The kids got nicely spoiled, and Nic and I made out alright ourselves.

But on top of the festivities, I took some of my time-off to work on my long term To Do list that I have on a white board behind my desk.

Before

If you’ve visited our house, you probably couldn’t miss the giant gaping hole in the wall where our TV sits. The previous owner, who is not quite as handy as he thinks he is, had built a TV cabinet into the wall, sized especially for his massive, old-school projo TV. Our TV is considerably better, but looked rather silly stuck in that hole. Unfortunately, the basement is literally built around the cabinet, so ripping it out with less than complete caution would probably bring the house down on top of me.

So I eventually decided to renovate it to fit my needs better. When I got a gift card to Home Depot for Christmas, I promptly went out and bought a jigsaw and started cutting. In the past week, or so, I’ve nearly finished my plan, building a shelf for the TV, and adding a back to the main cabinet.

During

After

I personally think it looks a million times better, although the final phase isn’t done yet. Rather than have the TV sitting on the shelf, I’ve ordered an articulating wall-mount arm, so that the TV will float in the cabinet, and can be pulled out and pointed in any direction. To that, I’ll add some blue rope lights so that (hopefully) there’ll be a subtle electric blue glow coming from behind the TV whenever its on…

But we didn’t stop with the TV cabinet (which has only just stopped reeking of wood finish.)

• Nic’s parent’s bought Benjamin bunk beds for his room, so on Saturday we had a little birthday part for him and built his new big boy bed, graduating Abigail to the convertible crib that can be changed into a small bed when she’s ready.

• With some of the Christmas money my parents sent us, we took a trip to Ikea and finally started decorating the living room. We got some really nice shelves and bookcases, and I have one small project left to build a picture frame for an African mural some friends gave us, that should pull that room together nicely — at least until the kids are a little older and its primary use is no longer for storing pastel colored toys, watching cartoons on Treehouse, and serving as a secondary dining room.

I feel like I’ve been building furniture for months, but its worth it. Once again, there’s this pride of… ownership, or… power over your own house. Having wrestled it into what you want it, with your own hands (and power tools) makes it feel that much more like home.

The Atomic Home

One of the things we intend to do with our new house is to make it as self-reliant as possible. We’ve lived for a long time depending on the resources of a landlord or an organization to provide the functionality we need from a home. Although we’ll probably never be one of those people who can live “off the grid” — at least not in this country — there’s a lot of things we want to learn about ensuring the independence of our own home.

There’s a lot of basics I need to learn more about, for example. I’m relatively competent with basic wiring, but the other day I removed a lightswitch in Abigail’s room to put in a dimmer, and ran into a wiring setup I’d never seen before. I can network my home and set-up my home theater better, maybe, than the average geek. But I don’t know the first thing about plumbing or carpentry, and I’d like to have at least some cursory knowledge in those areas.

A happy, and natural, side-effect of this goal is that our home will become more ‘green’ the more we lower our outside dependencies. I’ve found that regardless of your political view point or opinions on Global Warming, lately ‘green’ has been a pretty universally accepted “Good Thing” — simply because it reduces costs. Everyone wants to save money these days.

We have some large goals in this area, and some smaller ones we’re working on. My dad-in-law built his own industrial-strength wood furnace at their place in the country. This summer he hooked it up to heat the pool. For the winter he’s setting it up to heat their hot water tank, warm their house, and even pre-heat the air for the dryer. I’m not sure we’ll be able to do anything like that, but I am very interested in solar power.

Some friends of ours, who usually live in Africa, wired their place there to run completely on solar power, when its available, with a fall-back to a generator if it gets too cloudy, and once the batteries are drained. They, of course, have no other options, so were pretty motivated to get it working. They also are able to be faily picky about what appliances they run, and when. One of my goals is to get my entire home office running on solar power, falling back to grid power only when the batteries are nearly dead.

Here’s a couple of the smaller things we’re working on in the short term, that have already started saving us money:

• Timers: The home theater equipment, both upstairs and downstairs, is on timers. Most home theater devices are never really off unless you remove their power. If a device has a remote control, its drawing power even in its “off” state. LCD and Plasma TVs are fairly big offenders in this area. Your XBox 360, PS3 or Wii are also pretty bad.
  Upstairs we bought a powerbar with a timer built-in. It even has a little back-up battery so your program is never lost. Downstairs we have a more heavy-duty outdoor timer on the equipment. Late at night, a computer upstairs runs a script to cleanly shutdown itself and a remote script on the AppleTV to do the same. Shortly afterward the timer kills power to all the devices.
  Although I don’t have accurate numbers, our power bill has been below the previous “average” by $10 or more every month since we got the timers in place.
   
• Dimmers and motion sensors: We’re still rolling this plan out, but where ever possible we’ll be using these kinds of switches to provide only the light needed in a given room. In the kids rooms, in particular, we rarely want the lights on at full brightness anyway. In the garage and laundry room, a motion sensor makes lots of sense.
  These kinds of switches do mean you can’t use (cheap) CFL energy-efficient bulbs, but you can invest in dimmable CFLs, or use halogen high-efficiency bulbs which are almost as good, and don’t contain mercury.
   
• Gardening and composting: Both of these are Nicole’s pet projects. I’m not really sure how composting saves money, but its certainly ‘green’ and we feel better about reducing the amount of garbage we produce. Nic’s parents have grown their own vegetables in their garden for years. They taste better, save money, and are good for the environment.
   
• Cut the cable: OK, not as green, but this is a great money saver — do you really need your $40-or-more/month cable TV? No seriously, is there anything you watch on TV that you can’t get over the Internet for free or cheap? This may be the realm of the geek for another couple years, but the technology is getting better and easier to use. We don’t need cable — not even for even for events best watched live. We watched and followed the election coverage online the other day, and not once longed for commecial interuptions.
  We could do the same thing with the telephone if I didn’t work from home. Skype provides decent telephony for free-to-cheap that’s more than sufficient for personal use. Alas, despite our efforts, it doesn’t quite hack it for business use.
   
• Use your library, buy used: We learned this lesson early from a family who is frugal, wealthy, and not at all “green.” Your local library has a massive selection of great books, and probably has a decent array of movies that are free to borrow. Your children rarely need brand new clothes or toys — used stores rock, and the clearance shelf is a great place to shop!
   
• Walk more: I’m a hypocrite here. I have bad feet, so I’d be happy to drive half a block to the mailbox — if it weren’t for Benjamin, who loves going for “wwwwalks!” One of the nicest things about living in a small town, though, is that once you get past the lame excuses, there’s really nothing you can’t walk to get. Gas is finally getting cheaper, but we’re down to one car for the winter (maybe forever) and we’d prefer not to use it unless we have to. I understand walking is good for you too…
   

Ultimately, it’d be awesome if the only service our home needed to pay an outside organization for was Internet. Its probably not feasible in North America, but the closer we can get to that goal, the more money we save.
It probably goes without saying that there are wide variety of bad habits that, if eliminated or avoided, can probably save lots of money too.

How about you? Does anyone else have any ideas for saving money, reducing your dependencies and improving the environment?

Our house… in the middle of our street

Well I tried to find before pictures. but came up a little short. I wanted to show how bad the roof and the garage looked, but neither of these pictures really do it justice. In short, the roof was in really bad shape along the valleys, and had been partially replaced with an ugly, mis-matched section of shingles. The garage door, as I mentioned before, was dreadful, and the front door matched. Here’s the pics, hopefully you can get an idea of the “before.”

In the past two weeks we’ve:

• Re-painted the garage door
• Re-painted the front door
• Got the driveway ceiled
• Got the roof re-done

Those latter two we paid someone to do, but I’m happy with what we got for our money. The roof, in particular, is not something I would have been comfortable trying — even with a good crew of helpers. This afternoon, I washed both cars, putting the little car away for the winter, cleaned up the scraps from the roofing operation, and raked the lawn, leaving our house looking significantly different than when we moved in…

There are a couple things yet to be done by winter — we have one wooden window that needs to be re-painted and checked for a proper seal, and I want to paint a decorative bit on the front door. If I’m feeling really ambitious and the weather holds, I’ll do the trim around the garage and front door in a sharp white to make it all look at little cleaner.

Regardless, I’m very proud of our little house. This winter we’ll do a little work in-doors, and next summer we’ll tackle the backyard…

The Garage Door

One of the many apartments we’ve lived in was a townhouse. When we arrived, the front door was a little worse for wear, so I decided I’d go out and paint it. I hadn’t got an hour into it, when a voice behind me said “What do you think you’re doing?”
I turned to find a, previously friendly, neighbour glowering at me menacingly. “My door looked pretty grungy, so I’m just freshening it up with a coat of paint” I explained.
“You can’t do that, the condo board has to approve it!” He said.
“Well, it’s too late now,” I said, since I’d already had a good third of the door painted, “I’m going to have to finish.”

He stormed away, and later that day a small crowd of people gathered in the parking lot outside our house. I was sure there was going to be a lynching. Instead, two weeks later, professional painters arrived and painted every front door in the complex.

As I began scraping our garage door last weekend, you can imagine that I was looking over my shoulder a fair bit. But no one stopped me, or interrupted my work. A neighbour did, in fact, come over at one point, though. He brought a can of a substance called “Circa 1895″ which is a paint stripper that made the job much easier.

Our garage and front door were apparently given a hurried coat of paint, and we were not terribly happy with the color, or the work done. It was a peach/orange color, done with a dull, flat paint, on top of the existing paint job (which appears to have been yellow) — basically we had the worst looking garage door on the street. I set out, last weekend, with the goal of re-painting before Thanksgiving. An hour or two of slow scraping (after I discovered that sanding just wasn’t going to cut it) and I’d revised my target date signficantly. Once the paint stripper arrived, however, with much thanks to our pretty cool next-door neighbour, I was able to catch-up to my original goal.

Two coats of semi-gloss paint went on first thing Sunday morning, in beautiful, sunny weather. It looks 100% better, although I’m not 100% sold on our color choice. Both Nicole and her sister approve, though, so I guess that’s good enough. I still need to do the trim around the garage door, but I think I’ll be painting the front door to match first.

It was a ton of work, but there’s this sense of satisfaction that comes from improving your own home. Its a wonderful feeling, made all the better by the fact that no one can tell you you’re not allowed to do it…

Supplies and Tools Needed:

• $20 - Used hand sander (that broke just as the project was nearing completion)
• $35 - Circa 1895 paint stripper (owed to neighbor)
• $10 - Gift card for neighbor for saving me hours of labor
• $8 - Cheap paint brushes and paint tray for applying paint stripper
• $7 - Paint scrapers
• $3 - 3 Putty knives
• $8 - Wood filler to fix cracking wood
• $28 - Assorted kinds of sandpaper, trying to find stuff that would work
• $70 - High quality outdoor paint, self-priming
• $15 - Good paint brushes, medium sized roller, paint tray

Total: $204, and one week’s worth of work — with enough supplies left-over to do the front door at no extra cost.