Posts
Kitchen and living room lighting
We spent a lot of time and effort figuring out what kind of lighting we wanted for the kitchen and living room, the 15x30 one story “great room” with cathedral ceilings.
December 13, 2013
Electrical wiring
It’s been a long time since I wrote any updates about our house. We’re finally slowing down after a long push all summer to make the house habitable inside. We worked 12 hour days for months to get the electricals, plumbing, cabinets, countertops and shelving installed. It’s mostly done now and we’re able to relax a little and enjoy the house and its surroundings.
October 30, 2013
Making window sills
The rough openings around the windows are ugly and need to be trimmed, so we’ve started that project in a serious way this past week. We have 35 windows in the house, so this is going to be a lot of work. Each window takes anywhere from five to eight boards to trim it, depending on which wall of the house it’s on and how oversized the rough opening is. We’re using leftover pine sheathing to make the boards, and each board has to be cut and ripped to a custom size (because of slight variations in rough opening size). We’re also sanding each visible surface and applying a couple of coats of PolyWhey for moisture protection.
May 13, 2013
Applying polyurethane to the floors
After we sanded the floors, we were getting ready to apply the satin PolyWhey, a whey-based low-toxicity polyurethane. But we were delayed due to injuries, so two kind friends (thanks, E. and D.!) applied three coats of the stuff over a period of a couple of weeks. It looked great, but we decided to add an extra coat for better longevity, so we did that ourselves.
May 13, 2013
Fixing high CPU usage in Linux Mint 13 on ThinkPad X200s
#Linux#Linux Mint#Thinkpad#Ubuntu
One of the first things I noticed on the X200s after installing Mint 13 was that after logging in or after a suspend/resume, CPU usage seemed too high. The most immediate symptoms were that the mouse and keyboard were very slow to respond. The top command showed that various processes with kworker in their names were responsible for hogging nearly all of the CPU. This high CPU usage would continue for a minute or two before subsiding, but would reoccur at unpredictable times.
May 13, 2013
Fixing unresponsive wifi on ThinkPad X200s running Linux Mint 13
#Linux#Linux Mint#Thinkpad#Ubuntu
I upgraded the OS on a ThinkPad X200s from Linux Mint 10 to Linux Mint 13 (which is based on Ubuntu 12.04), and noticed that the wifi adapter no longer worked properly. It was able to obtain an IP address from a router, but attempts to send or receive data failed. This problem, as usual, is discussed on various forums, and is due to a bug in Intel’s wifi driver. To determine whether the machine uses the buggy Intel driver, do this in a terminal session:
April 19, 2013
Sanding the floors
After we finished most of the interior walls, we spent over a month sanding the floors to prepare them for polyurethane. The pine planks had gotten cupped, dirty, and discolored from exposure to sun and rain last summer before we got the roof on. We could have gone the easy route and painted the floors, but we like the natural wood look and decided to do the extra effort to preserve that look.
April 3, 2013
Interior framing
For the last month or so, we’ve been working on the interior framing: putting up the walls for the various rooms in the house. So far we’ve done the basement stairs, the kitchen pantry, the downstairs bedroom and bathroom, and the wall for the upstairs guest room. What’s left is the upstairs bathroom, which is going to be bit tricky due to the sloped ceiling, which comes down to about 4.5 feet at the outside wall.
February 7, 2013
The siding is done (mostly)
Yesterday we put up the last piece of siding, ending a six-week slog and a race against winter. We got it done just in time; last night it snowed a little and now it’s raining steadily. This was a huge milestone, and we can finally relax a little knowing that the house is weather-proof now.
December 10, 2012
Race against winter
We’re now in a race to see if we get all the siding up before real winter arrives. We managed to get the most difficult and dangerous part of it done over two days: putting up the siding over the one story roof.
November 15, 2012