The Bathroom Project Part 1 - Introduction

Merriam Webster defines project as "a specific plan or design" and that's a pretty okay way of defining it, but over the course of the bathroom project, I have my own definition of project. "Project: a related series of snafus that result in a (hopefully) desirable outcome". A year ago, a bad hail storm came through my area. As a result our insurance company paid for a new roof and paint job. Additionally, it was discovered that the damage to the roof caused by said hail storm the "kids' bathroom" ceiling, wall, and tub was damaged and the insurance company was going to cover the replacement costs.

So it was that at the beginning of summer my mom decided to make good on a promise she gave Emily years and years ago that she could redo the bathroom however she wanted to (within reason). Together the two of them began to conspire over the details of this new bathroom. The two of them finally decided on what tile to use about half way through the summer, and about a month and a half ago, the bathroom project officially began with a construction crew removing the tub, fixing the ceiling, installing the new tub, and installing the new tile. With their work completed, it now fell to us to finish the job. After all, we could never afford a new bathroom if they did all the work, but if we did it all a shiny new bathroom would be ours!

It began with the loss of the toilet. It was a heavy loss for me. Literally, I had to carry that sucker out of there and porcelain is quiet weighty. It was quickly followed by the removing of the vanity, tile, and wallpaper in rapid succession. Usually when someone talks about a house having 1 and 1/2 bathrooms they mean one bathroom only has a toilet and sink, ours only had a shower. This bathroom remained in this state of limbo for a couple weeks while Emily deliberated over what color paint to use. Two coats of killz and one coat of brown coco later, my mom and I realized that before applying the final coat of brown coco, we should lay down the concrete backer board that was necessary for the tile to adhere to or else we were going to rip up her nice paint as we wedge these concrete board in to the room. And just like that, the snafus came marching in two by two!

The Bathroom Project Part 1 - Introduction

Why am I up at 1 AM?

A couple weeks ago, maybe a month, I woke in the morning to an odd clicking noise. Now, when I say morning I actually mean about 4 AM. I try to ignore it at first, but as the clicking continues I wake up enough to realize that there is something bug-like in my room. Needless to say, this distressed me. I have enough trouble waking up almost nightly thinking there's some giant bug crawling down my wall without there actually being any bugs in my room. But I do muster up the courage to hunt down this bug that will undoubtedly rush my face when I find it only to find it is in this stationary holder I have. It's kinda like....


...that only less sissy... and full of calculators, earphones, and hands-free sets. I dump it out and squish it dead, then promptly sleep until a decent time to wake up say... 9:00 AM.

Regardless, my bug woes continued tonight as this huge bug flies out of nowhere (literally, it just popped up out of nowhere on my ceiling) and lands on the ceiling. The time is 11:45-ish, I was about to climb into bed. Well I grab a shoe with which to strike it down and begin my advance only to realize that I had grab the shoe for my left foot but I wanted to put it on my right hand, it just wasn't gonna work. So I turned around, swapped out shoes, and in the 4 seconds it took me to accomplish this task the thing disappears.

But it's not like I can just go to sleep, ya know? There's a huge bug somewhere in my room. I know I'm gonna wake up with that sucker on my face and I'll never sleep again. So instead of doing what a rational person would do (just go to sleep), I turn out the light in my room, turn on the light in the hall and sit down with a book on my bug stake out. I'm just waiting for this bug to become attracted by the light and wonder out of my room. Now, in all honesty, I don't care if I actually succeed in killing it once it is out of my room. I count it as a full victory if I merely get it out of my room!

Sadly, it was resolute in staying concealed in my room and after... an hour and 15 minutes, several different attempts to change the conditions in the room to get it out of its hiding spot and back onto the ceiling (fan on, fan off, lights on, lights off) I'm beginning to consider just calling it quits and sleeping in the hallway... or my sister's room, why didn't that occur to me until just now? (my sister is not here tonight, for the record which is why her room would have been an option) Regardless, just as I'm about to pack it up I hear an all too familiar, "click". Yes, that giant ol' bug that had rushed me had been another click beetle. And while I did consider it extremely odd that two click beetles would invade my room so close to one another (and leave the rest of the house completely alone?) what was truly perplexing to me is that I once again found it in



that.

Why am I up at 1 AM?

Fan Project Part 3

If you didn't see Part 2, I posted it just before this one, so go check it out.

With the wires now successfully in place. It was time for the easy part: hanging the fan itself. It was an extremely simple task as anyone who has done it before can tell you. I had a little interesting time since I had three feet of extra electrical wire sticking down the ceiling, but after stuffing the spare wire back up into the attic, it was just a couple of quick twist to get the power hooked up to the fan wires

Hide the wires


Attach the blades


And install the lights (hey look, someone is looking at blogger on that computer monitor)

And voila! A completed fan project. It was much to my joy that when we switch power back onto the rooms, that the light switch on the wall controlled the lights on the fan, but not the fan blades themselves (which was what I was trying to do). This way we can turn the lights off at night and leave the fan running. Total project time: about 12-15 hours. It was a lot of fun, but I'm not going back into the attic any time soon!

Here's a picture of the view of mine and Emily's room with the fan's running (not that you can tell since my flash drowns out the light and fan motion) ... and the mess that I call my work space.

Fan Project Part 3

Fan Project Part 2 and car mayhem

So having installed the fan box, it was time to install the electrical wiring. My initial hope was to drop the wire down the wall to where the light switch is and draw power from there. This would have given me the added benefit of making the switched outlet in my room an outlet with constant power (like all the rest in my room). After spending time in the attic, however, I quickly realized that would never work. So Emily got the idea to feed the line up to the attic, a fantastic idea that also proved impossible. So it's getting to the hot part of the day, but I've already cut a wire up in the attic, I can't turn power back on until I get this fixed. I finally just did a quick patch and stumbled out of the attic practically passing out. Not a fun experience.

Fortunately, I did figure out what I needed to do after consulting our local electric handyman, and my brother's father-in-law, Mr. Pait. Here's the problem. I have these power wires in the attic that are cut exactly to the right length; no slack what-so-ever so them. so if I cut it, I cannot reconnect it, it just can't be done. So what I had to do ultimately was to cut the wire and then install a junction box for the left side of the wire to go into all for the sole purpose of attaching additional wire to connect to a second junction box where the right side of the wire would connect to as well as the wire that would go down to the fan. Here's a VERY simplistic drawing of what happened.
So the long story short is that since I was doing a wire for the lights and a wire for the power I had to do the above picture four times. That's 8 junction boxes (and junction box covers). 20 junction box fittings to cover the hole where the wire went in (it keeps flammable stuff from getting in the box). 16 screws to keep the junction boxes in place, 24 wire caps, 4 segments of wire to connect one junction box to the other and 4 segments of wire to take it from the junction box to the fan itself. It took about an hour for each of these with an hour break when I was half way done. But God was EXTREMELY merciful to me in that He gave me a glorious overcast day to be in the attic. Here's a picture of the end result from the room (I'm not about to take my camera into that attic!)



After I got the wiring done (around noon). I showered and met up with Amy for a long promised clothes run. See, she and I have differing opinions on how long clothes should last. I say until they too full of holes to be worn, and she says once they start getting ugly they should be changed out. Oh, my girl and her crazy ideas.

So we hit up Khol's and Target and get 3 pants and 6 shirts for about a hundred dollars. I'm a very good clothes shopper. After Target the exhaustion from the heat in the attic and the physical demands of being up there catch up with me and we call it a day (1 hour after beginning). We try to go to her parent's house, but the A/C was being repaired and I wasn't feeling great about the heat. Amy, being my ever watchful and caring girlfriend, decides that we should head out to Blockbuster and get me out of the heat. I ask her to drive and as we're leaving her neighborhood we look at each other and go "does something sound funny to you?"

Turns out it was the rear passenger tire that was sounding funny. Flat funny. Fortunately, Amy was able to pull over into some shade and a half hour latter, we headed back to her house with a donut spare. The evening did get better after that though. The A/C was fixed and it cooled off rapidly. Then Amy's parents treated us to dinner at this fun little Greek restaurant (the hamburgers were excellent!). It was a truly fun experience.

Fan Project Part 2 and car mayhem

Internet resolutions and Fan Project part 1

To follow up on the last post, I was finally able to get the internet problem resolved. After countless of calls ending in "call Linksys" or "call Time Warner" I finally learned two things:

1) Linksys had the firmware to fix the entire mess but refused to give it to me because they only give it to ISPs (call Time Warner).

2) Time Warner Cable (aka Road Runner High Speed Internet) also had the firmware but refused to give it to me because they used special software and lacked the ability to manually give me the firmware, but it's possible the maker of my router had the firmware I needed (call Linksys).

Now, I've been using cable internet since it was called AT&T Broadband Internet (ATTBI), then Comcast bought it out, and I will forever consider them the people I had to most reliable service with, and now Time Warner has bought THEM out! Feh.

I called my school today and an Arab girl picks up and asks me who I'm trying to call in a very thick accent. My first thought was to say "Don't you people get a job doing anything other than answering phones poorly?!", but I quickly stifled that thought because it was racists, rude, and only brought on by how many times I had called my American based company and got sent overseas to some people who didn't know the first thing about my router.

Oh, the final solution, by the way, was to have Time Warner give us a new modem (for free!) and then shell out 50 bucks for a new Linksys wireless router (did I mention I'm a big Linksys fan?).

So enough with the geek talk.

I've started a fan project at my parents house. Since we have moved in to this home, some 19 years ago, we have lamented the fact that the bedrooms completely lack a ceiling light... or any light. There is a single wall outlet controlled by a light switch, but who wants to waste space with a floor lamp? Besides, those things don't spreed light well.

Last week, my mom expressed the desire to save some money in the house by raising the thermostat and getting some floor fans in the rooms. Again, who wants to waste space like that? So I did some research, priced it out, and presented a plan to install ceiling fans in mine and my sister's room. A task made hard mainly since there's no place to install a ceiling fan.

So today I got the green light from mom on the fan to buy (with a light kit for light of course) and after dinner I jumped on into the attic to install a fan box to mount the fan from. It seemed like an easy enough project: I cut the hole in the ceiling, find that hole in attic, put the box in place, and screw it down. That's when the snags hit.

I had wisely opted to bring a board into the attic to set my tools down on, but maneuvering through that tiny space while holding a board... not so easy. But I do make it to where my room is only, hey where the hole? Snag #1.

No problem, I brought a very nice walkie talkie up there with me, I'll call mom and have her tap on the ceiling next to the hole, but hey what's this? My Walkie is missing! Snag #2.

I make it back to the ladder leading back into the house and find that my walkie fell off before I even got up there. Oh well, I didn't have all the tools anyway, I grab the walkie, the tools and head back on up with my mom waiting in my room to tap on the ceiling with a cane. After an arduous trek to my room, I find the cane sticking out of the sea of insulation. Only there's a little problem I'm going to have to get flat on my stomach to get out there since I'll have a couple inches of clearance even with lying down. Snag #3

Fortunately, I did have that board with me and I am able to lie on it between the rafters and not come crashing through the ceiling. So I clear out the insulation from around the hole and find that while I am between two rafters (the way I wanted it), there is this random plank of wood that comes down diagonally from the right and crosses right over my hole. Snag #4.

Again, God is merciful and I have just enough room to fit the fan box (and the rod it connects to) under the plank of wood. I line the box up with my beautiful little hole and discover that I forgot to account for the direction the box would be oriented when I cut my hole and am now trying to force a square box down a round hole (figuratively speaking of course). Snag #5.

After working it around, I'm able to get the box in correctly and attempt to screw it on home. Only problem is the drill is too big and I can get the screws in with the box attached to the rod. Snag #6.

At this point, I'm exhausted, hot, and full of fiber glass insulation. But I'm determined to get this done! So I take off the fan box from the rod and focus solely on getting that rod firmly attached to the rafters on either side of it. After all, the rod is what truly holds the weight of the fan and it is vital that it is secured tight. Meanwhile, my mom is down in my room being a wonderful mother and handing me anything I need while forsaking her own project of working on the kids' bathroom.

After countless attempts of getting that blasted rod oriented correctly, I manage to screw it on home and move the board back so I can easily grab it the next time I'm up there and move it ever so slightly over to Emily's room. With a final mighty burst of energy I work my way back across the attic only to see my mom waiting for me with Snags # 7, 8, and 9.

Turns out I failed to properly comprehend the pervasiveness of insulation. A good amount fell out of my ceiling onto the floor which mom cleaned up. (Snag #7), another portion fell out onto Emily's bed which I had attempted to cover up, but failed miserably (Snag #8), and finally, some insulation had fallen out and gotten over some of the clothes in the closet the ladder comes down into (Snag #9). Oops, sorry mom. Mom is forgiving and only insists that I clean up the floors and move the bed out of Emily's room before I get started again tomorrow.

So I shower up, I'm just pouring sweat at this point, and traipse into my room to finish the job. After all, I had taken the box off the rod to get it in position. Oh did I mention Snag #10? Since I had removed the box, it looked like I was a little off on the position of the rod. Hilarious fun! Fortunately, I am able, with mom's help, to get the fan box attached from the bottom.

While telling dad about the problem with the drill afterwards, he sits there for a minute and says, "the screws should be hexagonal heads, why don't you use a socket and ratchet?" Rats, he's totally right.

The good news it that I did work out all the little kinks and Emily's doesn't have the plank so it should be significantly easier (especially since I'm bringing a socket and ratchet with me). Plus, there final project is looking VERY nice. See?



There is a little space around it where I had to rotate the box to get it properly oriented, but that is one nicely done job if I do say so myself! You can see where the electrical wire I'm laying down will come in to the box and give it some power. I'll take plenty of pictures and let y'all know how it goes! Soon, I'm gonna do a post about all my family and I have done project wise this summer, it's amazing!

Edit: I forgot to mention this, but the total time to install that? 3 hours. So VERY many painful snags!

Internet resolutions and Fan Project part 1

So much frustration

So I've been having internet problems for almost a month now. Anytime I use a P2P software (only for legal reasons I promise), my internet connection dies. Turns out that about 3 weeks ago my ISP updated their software and my router is no longer compatible with it. My ISP tells me that a simple firmware upgrade should fix the problem. Only problem is the firmware they're pushing isn't compatible with my router? That's odd. They tell me to give the makers of my router a call. I can't find a number to call so ultimately I use their online chat. A man named "Ernie C." asks me what the problem is and I tell him I need a firmware update for my router. He curtly informed me that my router was a wireless gateway and therefore "has no firmware".

Really? Are you kidding me? That's funny because your wireless gateway has a different story.

You can't make it out too well, but that says "firmware version" followed by the firmware version. Of course, that was one step better than the next lady I had who tried to get me to download the latest USB drivers for my router to update my firmware version. I hate dealing with lower level know nothings.

So much frustration

Did I mention I was a geek?

Okay, so a little break from what I just posted and what I have in the works for my next post to talk about something I'm quite passionate about; electronics (And with that 90% of the people who read this leave). Hear me out :p In the many years I've had a surround sound system set up in this house I have had an on going battle with getting everything to work with a single remote. And not just a single remote, on no! A single remote that allows a user to sit down and with a single click of a button watch some television. There is no desire in this house to have to push 5 buttons to get everything turned on and set correctly.

For a while I've been exploring the universal remotes with the nice little LCD screen that lets you choose with electronic device you want on, but all of those cost in the $100 minimum range making them assuredly a non-option. Other options I researched were turning a PDA into a remote, a plan that was scrubbed because any PDA of sufficient capabilities would end up costing as much as a universal remote, and using an iPod, which turned out to be extremely limited and rather useless.

Thus it was, as I researched various solutions, that I happened upon a remote that advertised macro buttons. Turns out that there are a large selection of very modest remotes that have the very feature that all the fancy remotes advertise so well. (A macro button sends multiple commands with the push of a single button). And while that is cool enough on its own, the really interesting part started after I found this remote. (for those interested it is the URC-8910 and I've found it for as little as $16 + a few dollars for shipping and handling)

As I read user reviews on this remote I kept seeing people mention this mysterious JP1. Now, to me JP1 means Jumper 1. I see this on every motherboard for every computer I've every dealt with, but no where could I find what JP1 meant to these people. All that anyone ever said was, "but using JP1 quickly fixed that problem!" After several searches I finally found the right combination of phrases that lead me to a forum that had a link to what JP1 was.

Here is what JP1 is. On certain remotes (especially those of radio shack and One for All) there is a 6 pin connector located in the battery compartment with a small JP1 printed on the circuit board next to it. Someone discovered that you could create a custom cable to connect your computer to your remote using this so-called JP1 connector. Then other people realized that you could download the contents of your remote and replace it with custom signals to make your universal remote TRULY universal. Check out the cable that connects the remote to the computer via the serial port (a more expensive usb cable was offered as was a parallel cable)



No more will people have to settle for a remote that mostly works their equipment. These people have THOROUGHLY documented every piece of remote controlled equipment they can get their hands on and relish finding the right signals to get new equipment to work. I'm excited to get my cable in the mail so I can start programming the remote to make it the ultimate universal remote! I actually encourage anyone who reads this to make sure the next remote they get is JP1 capable and learn how to modify the remote to stream line it (or ask me to come do it for you :P ).

Now here's some linkage for you!
Buy the URC-8910 remote at home depot (out of stock last I checked, but maybe you'll get lucky)
Google listings of URC-8910 remote sellers(I just typed URC-8910 into Google search)
Good place to get the JP1 cables
Learn more about JP1 over at this sub-culture's forum!
Good list of current and past JP1 remotes (It's a forum post, click on the download button under the post)

Did I mention I was a geek?